Operational Meeting

Apologies for absence

None

Minutes of the last meeting.

These were accepted (corrections received in email).

Actions.

All actions ongoing.

Building money is available to go towards replacing old servers and improving our power usage. We currently have 180+ servers and Alastair would like to see us lose 70+ through the use of this money and through virtualization. Machines paid for by research grants are not included in this exercise but will need to be considered in the future.

Alison reported that she now has keys for 2.09 and will give one to each member of frontline support and one to each unit.

Reports from units.

• Infrastructure.
  1. Server room racks

     We now have the ability to power on and off machines on the controllable power bars remotely. Iain requested the Beowulf racks be turned around ASAP so there will be no delay when the A/C is sorted to bringing the clusters back up.

  2. IP addresses

     Wire K has some services on it. George said this is advance notice and there is no immediate pressure to release these wires.

  4. Informatics root certificate

     Expires near the end of October.

• Managed Platform.
  1. inv to sysinfo transition

     Ken says the database is as up to date as it can be. We will need to be told how to drive the inventory using the new tools.

• Research and Teaching.
  2. ITO RT

     There is a possible problem with all the RT systems - when users reply to tickets after they have been created using a different email address they get a bounce. This will need to be investigated and fixed. Chris is trying to produce a common header for RT which each RT service can take as a starting point as they are all mostly identical. Stephen suggests we can use LDAP to canonicalise names for handling multiple addresses for students (sMATRIC@inf, sMATRIC@sms, J.Bloggs@sms).

• Services.
  3. Problems printing PDFs on IF413m0

     The problem has been fixed by upgrading the firmware.

• User Support.
  2. RT ticket Resolution Rates

     Resolution rate for tickets in non-support queues has dropped, units may wish to check why.

There were none.

AOCB

Stephen had been tidying up profiles for the inventory changes and noticed that at least 100 profiles have specific package modifications in them - many with no indication of who had done this, when or why. Some were older versions of packages so we don't know if they should be updated, some were simply temporary until the next release and some were additional packages (in some cases the same additional packages in more than one profile). His recommendation was that we

• have a standard comment tag for temporary changes that we can automatically grep for and send reminders to cos to remove
• use headers for new package sets as much as possible (eg. create a header for the packages and add the packages to the profile with the comment tag above, then when reminded remove from the profile and use the header which should now be in stable)
• have a who/why/when policy, eg. commenting with RT number is ideal but if not a simple one line explanation

Roger asked if we needed to do anything for the Open Doors day at the weekend - we do not believe so.

Iain mentioned that his swipe card had not worked to get into 2501. There have been ongoing works up there and something may have broken, Iain is chasing.

Chris requested a more meeting friendly semi-circular chair arrangement for the next meeting.

If Neil's Euromillions syndicate wins it may be very quiet in the Forum on Monday - find out by being in the pub after work on Friday.

The next meeting will be on the 8th of October and chaired by Craig Strachan. Time and location to be confirmed.