Operational Meeting

Apologies for absence

Alastair, Alison

Minutes of the last meeting.

These were accepted.

• KB Server Room

  It was noted that under what was believed to be the current schedules for the KB refurbishment, the AT refurbishment and the FH sale, there would be a gap of about four months in off-site provision. George will take this to CEG to consider further.

This item was skipped.

Reports from units.

• Infrastructure.
  1. "Temporary" dhcp addresses

     George will pass a list of those "temporary" dhcp addresses which are still being used to support to follow up.

  2. Forum Server Room
     • We will need to order up a variety of lengths of power and data cables.
     • The question of wiring record cards was raised. The inf-unit will consider this. The issue should be less than at some of our previous sites, though, as machines will be patched directly to switches and console servers, rather than indirectly via fixed wiring.
     • Stephen is trying out moving a server, based on outline instructions from George.
     • Ian has some console dongles, but more will need to be made up. Unfortunately there's some soldering required, so the techs will need to be involved.
  3. Procedures for Switch Firmware Upgrades

     It should be possible to try most new firmware on test switches before deployment, and then stage reboots over several days. Some switches can take a couple of minutes to reboot. The phones are mostly independent of the data network, but timing of reboots would still have to take them into account.

  • Wireless

    Surveying the wireless propagation and installing additional access points would be done as soon as possible.

• Managed Platform.
  4. boreas upgrade

     It was suggested that there would still be time to make a DNS change which might mitigate some of the effects during boreas's upgrade. Chris will look into this.

• Research and Teaching.
  2. Lab Exams (Resit)

     There was some discussion about how best to achieve as close a configuration as possible to that obtaining at the time of the initial exams. One possibility might be to revert to a previous stable release, but there was concern that resource changes in the meantime might still affect things, or even prevent that release working properly at all. Ultimately, virtualisation might be the answer...

• Services.
  1. JCMB File Servers Moved

     It was noted that there would be a power shutdown for parts of JCMB including 2501 on Saturday 16th in connection with refurbishment work taking place in our old offices.

• User Support.

• University's Source Repository

  The following points emerged from the discussion:

  • It's essential that our users be able to work easily with external collaborators.
  • The repository would be EASE-authenticated. eVisitor still isn't in production use, and the expectation would be that external collaborators would have to have full visitor accounts. This would be rather heavyweight, and cause us considerable overhead.
  • It appears that only svn is being considered, which is rather limited. We would want to see integrated bug-tracking, testing and auto-building too.
  • The announcement came via one of the ECDF mailing lists. Iain is on the relevant list, and offered to collate responses for posting to the list.
  • In any case, CEG and/or Alastair will likely need to incorporate arguments for our own provision in the next "IT Strategy" edition.

AOCB

Simon raised the issue of the blocking of IRC ports by default. It was agreed that this was probably no longer such an issue as it had been in the past. George will unblock them to see what happens.

The next meeting will be on the 27th of August in IF-4.33 at 11 o'clock and chaired by George Ross.