Meridius Upgrade - May 18th to May 24th CITS has acquired a more contemporary Meridius SPAM detection appliance, and we would like to install this appliance as soon as possible. Due to the complexity of the transition we will need to schedule a window of approximately 5-6 days to complete this switchover. During this timeframe you will see an increase in the amount of email in your in box due to the fact that we are not catching and quarantining SPAM emails. Once the system is brought back on line your email will return to normal with SPAM emails being sent to your quarantine mailbox. We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause and will be working on the upgrade continuously throughout this time to restore the service as soon as possible. May 18th - 8pm Shut down the Meridius service and stop the quarantine digest delivery. Users will begin to see an increase in email since we are no longer scanning for SPAM messages. Run a cleanup script provided by Blue Cat to remove any quarantine mailboxes that have never been accessed. This will take approximately 4 to 5 hours. Depending on the number of old mailboxes removed, we could have a significant decrease in the amount of time needed to perform the system backup and restore. May 19th - Start the system backup. This could take up to 40 hours depending on the number of old mailboxes that were removed by the cleanup script. May 21st - Swap out and configure new hardware. May 21st - Begin restoring system, again the amount of time will be dependent on the number of mailboxes removed. We will be able to better estimate the restore time based on the amount of time that was required for the backup. May 22nd - 24th - Push the configuration to newly restored server. Start quarantine digest service and return to normal operations. The timeline above reflects a worst case scenario where the backup and restore would take upwards of 40 hours each. Depending on the number of old unused mailboxes we could see a significant decrease in the amount of time to do the backup and restore. |
