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Tim, Toby, Roger
Craig pointed out that the pointer to the minutes of the last meeting in the minutes of the last meeting was pointing to the wrong place.
Actions completed:
Actions added:
Report from Computing Executive Group
Reports from units.
Stephen mentioned that the MPU are working on monitoring the updaterpms process.
George considers that this problem is much less likely to happen now.
Graeme reported that this appears to have been fixed.
It was agreed that we should reuse the old AT server room code
Craig reported that routing on unicorn has been restarted allowing RIP to be turned off at KB.
Some rearranging of machines in the labs will be necessary to keep the required number of SL5.2 machines available for the resits.
Stephen noted that an enhancement to the cron component will allow for a wider spread of random start times for cron jobs. This may be of some help in situations like this.
It was agreed that all units will reboot the servers they have responsibility for by the end of the month.
PE R200s and R710s have broadcom network cards and may still be affected by PXE issues.
Chris noted that the sleep component is now being trialled in one of the student labs. These is now information on the systems pages abou the sleep mechanism.
Chris would like to slightly alter the start time of some standard cron jobs to reduce the number of times machines have to wake up to run a cron job. He will mail round details of his proposed changes.
Tim will check out the politics of managing hamburg.
After some discussion, it was agreed that with the introduction of AFS, using ssh public keys isn't the correct solution in the vast majority of cases and that since user problems with public keys creates a support load, their use should be strongly discouraged. Alison will update the advice on the support website and consider a newsletter article. Since it's possible that there are edge cases where the use of ssh public keys remains appropriate, we will not discontinue support for them.
As a follow up to this, it was agreed to produce a new newsletter after the start of the next academic year.
It would appear that IS, perhaps based on a mis-interpretation of a paper written by Paul, have an incorrect notion of the School's position on the use of EASE passwords with services. After some discussion to clarify what the School's position actually was, it was agreed that Simon should write a short note for IS summarising this discussion and making our position clear.
There has been another request for a more generalised mailing list for issues such as food availability within the Forum. the membership of such a list could be generated from the database but this makes it hard to manage people who wish to unsubscribe from the list and leads to a substantial support overhead. It was agreed that the most sensible solution would be to create an opt-in mailing list called something like inf-trivia or inf-general, intended for users on both sites and initially empty. Users will be invited to join the list should they so desire. Membership will be restricted to .ed. mail addresses. The notion of per-floor mailing lists for the Forum was also discussed but it was agreed that these are not really appropriate.
Craig will take this proposal to Dave for his approval.
Chris outlined his plan to adjust the start time of some cron jobs to reduce the number of times machines have to wake up to run these jobs. It was agreed that he should mail around details of his proposed changes but that the idea was sound.
AOCB
Neil's discovery of the spam blocking of certain messages to a wide University audience by IS was discussed.
The next Operational meeting will be on Wednesday 26th August in IF-4.31 chaired by Craig Strachan.
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