Operational Meeting

Alastair, Graham, Tim, Simon, Ian, Gordon

These were accepted.

Actions completed:

• Clear shelf space in Forum server room.
• Inform Stuart and/or Teaching Committee of news service news.
• CUPS not to be running on servers by default - now in test release.

Action updates:

• follow up on 24/02/10 AFS discussion: this will be handled by the AFS follow-on project (Further AFS development and automation).
• Re-configure ex-mars machines: some have been completed but Alison to confirm which ones.
• Removal of AMD from servers: MPU to test.

Actions added:

• Arrange reboot of servers requiring to pick up SL5.4 updates as soon as possible.

Report from Computing Executive Group

• No report.

Reports from units.

• Infrastructure.

  2. Switch reconfiguration timeouts.

     Please report any timeouts when closing an rfe to change a Forum switch's configuration to George so that he can investigate.

  4. Junk in the Forum Server Room.

     Please remove any junk from the server room.

• Managed Platform.

  1. Please arrange to reboot servers requiring to pick up SL5.4 updates.
  3. Stephen advised that any new templates should be written using the new-style Perl Template Toolkit rather than the LCFG template parser where a number of bugs have been identified.

     In response to a question about updaterpms, Stephen advised that we should never submit a package with the same name (and version + release) as one already in the repository. Squid caching would result in the original version almost always being distributed. As a minimum, the release number should be incremented.

• Research and Teaching.

• Services.

• User Support.

Topics for discussion

1. Installation of web-cam in KB server room

   It was agreed that this is potentially a feasible plan but, as we are also changing tapes in KB approximately every 10 days, whoever performs this task should also take a quick glance and report any potential issues.

AOCB

1. ssh server update

   Neil asked for an update on the ssh server situation. Stephen explained that no concrete evidence had been found. He also added that there is now a plan to introduce rpm verifier (possibly daily) and run this against a list of critical rpms. We would also block external addresses from where there had been multiple failed attempts for a period of 1 or 2 hours.

   The question of whether system accounts ever need to ssh (even internal) was raised and it was agreed that there are circumstances where this is required.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 28th April in room 4.31.