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Apologies for absence
Alison, Carol, George, Graham, Ken, Tim
These were accepted.
The following items were removed from the actions list:
DONE
DONE
Being tracked at development meeting
DONE - being tracked at CEG
The issue of the forthcoming move to Staffmail was raised with particular reference to those users who currently have Informatics mail accounts but who will not get Staffmail accounts. Craig reported that these users will be mailed shortly to advise them that if they have not done so already, they will have to nominate a mail account to which their Informatics mail will be forwarded to before the end of the month.
Stephen wondered if it might be useful to have a web interface which would allow users to manage where their Informatics mail was forwarded to. It wasn't clear that this facility would be used sufficiently to justify the effort involved.
It was agreed that the profile of mail forwarding should be raised by means of a newsletter article.
Reports from units.
Ian stated that it would be useful to know which of the machines currently located in the Forum machine room should be considered 'critical' since this will have an impact on how the rotation of the racks is carried out. It seems likely that machines in the affected racks may be out of service for a couple of hours which is unlikely to be acceptable for machines such as the mail and print servers.
Neil asked whether it would be feasible to move critical machines to a rack which has already been rotated since this would mean a shorter down-time for the machines in question.
Toby clarified that it will be possible to obtain new certificates as soon as the renewal takes place next Tuesday. This may be preferable to allowing the machine to obtain a new certificate unsupervised overnight.
Toby will produce a list of machines using X509 and distributed it before the renewal takes place.
Iain requested that Stephen should add mutation macros to the inv resources of the beowulf nodes as well as the profiles hosted on the main LCFG server.
No report submitted.
Lindsey and Roger raised the topic of support for the AV equipment in the Forum. The support staff don't have sufficient knowledge of the equipment to be able to offer a high standard of support to the users, especially when requests for support come in at very short notice. Alastair suggested that members of the US unit should book out the individual meeting rooms to give themselves time to familiarise themselves with the equipment. It is hoped that the newly formed Meeting Room committee which Alastair attends will clarify how this equipment should be supported and used.
It was agreed that Alastair should produce a interim policy on the service we will offer for AV equipment.
It was the general view of the meeting that, tinfoil hat style paranoia and network technical issues aside, allowing the MFDs to supply Canon with information such as consumable supply levels and page counts was on balance probably a good thing. Craig will try to make the original document from Canon specifying the data which the machines send more generally available in case further objections occur to anyone.
The general topic of how the MFDs are used still needs some settling. Craig will liaise with Gordon Duckett in an effort to come up with a solution which pleases everyone.
Craig and Neil pointed out that rather than going to an external source (Google) for a Forum forum, it would be relatively simple to add one to the current migration website (which will be renamed the Forum website at some point). After some effort, the meeting recalled that there is an fact a central bulletin board service, marzipan.ucs which Morna had made use of in the past. Rather than run our own service, Alastair will ask Chris Adie whether we might make use of this service for a Forum forum.
For University guidance on using external services, see here.
It was agreed that this item should be deferred until all interested parties could attend the meeting.
AOCB
There was a brief discussion on how our massive lottery winnings should be disposed of.
The next meeting will be on Wednesday the 22nd of October in IF-4.33 at 10am, chaired by Craig Strachan.
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