Operational Meeting

These were accepted as a reasonable account of the last meeting.

Actions discussed:

• Review pages in computing.help

  Folk were reminded that the review of pages with a review date prior to mid-2014 should be completed by the beginning of April. (The first Ops meeting in April is Wed 13th.)

  CEG-owned pages should have a corresponding action there.

• Investigate Virtual DICE diffs

  The January (sic) release is due, so Chris will look to producing a set of diffs when that one is made.

Actions added or revived:

• RAT to schedule a test for on-line-exam resilience against various network outages (was previously deferred).

Report from Computing Executive Group

2. CCPAG meets the CISO

   Suggested topics for the meeting:

   • Why we prefer INF authentication to EASE authentication
   • ESISS
   • Automated issuing of SSL certificates
   • (OfficeNNN vs staffmail was thought to be out of scope)

   Please send any further suggestions to Alastair ASAP.

3. AT decant update

   Alastair gave a verbal report on progress, and the possible options for and consequent on level 6.

Reports from Units

• Infrastructure

  3. #verbatim

     George will recreate the list and circulate.

  4. Non-Informatics users on the Informatics network

     It was clarified that this referred to both external non-University users as well as those from other Schools; and that our users on non-Informatics subnets (such as at South College Street) were also included. We want to get this in as part of the ongoing EdLAN review, so comments and suggestions to George ASAP please.

  • Wilkie Building power outage

    There was a power outage for (some of) Wilkie Building this morning. E&B report that a "transformer tripped" and that there were "widespread outages in medics area". There'll be further work carried out in the area tomorrow (Thursday 10th) evening.

• Managed Platform

  • Encryption

    It wasn't clear how this would affect the entropy pool.

  • NX on SL7

    Neil wondered whether there might be at least one missing "dcs-style" X-related package.

    [Post meeting: the packages involved are dice-fvwm-startup, dice-xdm and dice-dcs-Xstartup. For SL6 they're all in core/packages/dice/dice_sl6_unsupported.rpms, while for SL7 the first and third are in core/packages/dice/dice_sl7_env_graphical.rpms while dice-xdm doesn't appear to be in anything at all. dice-xdm does have some scripts which are useful for hooking into session-managers other than xdm, in addition to the component itself.]

  • KVM server firmware

    The KVM server need some firmware upgrades. This will be scheduled over the next few weeks, and will entail some downtime and/or temporary migrations.

• Research and Teaching

• Services

  2. printer spool space

     There should really be better monitoring of the spool space.

     There was some discussion as to the best way to expand this. While there were several schemes proposed, it seemed as though reinstalling might be the easiest.

     Could we impose size limits? "It depends." There are ways in which a small submission may be expanded by cups as a temporary file along the way. And what happens when lots of students all try to print simultaneously in one of the labs?

     It seems really that having a decent amount of spool space, which is monitored, is the way to go.

  • The external user's blog that was discussed last time was approved by Alastair and Perdita, but in the meantime they decided just to do their own thing anyway. (RT#76266)

• User Support

Topics for discussion

• SL7 desktop upgrades

  This was held over.

AOCB

The next meeting will be on 9th March 2016 at 10:00 in IF-4.31, chaired by Craig.