Operational Meeting

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

Actions discussed:

• SL7 server room desktops

  The Forum server room has been done.

• Schedule WordPress upgrades

  blog.inf done.

• Clear out old SL6 profiles

  Stephen will 'nag' about sl6 profiles - there are around 400 so there is a need to tidy this up!

• KVM servers and VMs with end users

  Chris has created a document. All to read for next Operational Meeting.

• Comments on Internet Safety

  No comments received.

Actions added or revived:

• exFAT legality

  Iain's not had a definitive response from Angus but this is something we are being asked about regularly. We should create a FAQ explaining that we can't do this for now due to legality concerns and provide alternative workaround solutions e.g. use an open area/IS lab Windows machine.

Actions completed:

• Access to visitor tab

  Support team now have access to the visitor tab in Theon.

Blog articles suggested:

• None

Report from Computing Executive Group

• CCPAG Report
  • Windows 10

    We need to engage with this. Lindsey has already noted interest with IS.

  • Register of Services

    Should be in a position to import data in Jul/Aug.

  • CCPAG Convener

    Colin Higgs is taking over from Gareth Poxon.

  • IS ITI projects

    They will now be done using the same process as IS Apps.

  • Server Room Audit

    There will be an audit of power usage in all server rooms. George will provide the figures for Informatics.

  • Cloud Service

    An OpenStack service will be developed in parallel with Research cloud. Alastair raised the question whether it could be used for teaching.

  • DataStore

    Problems with samba under DataStore requiring samba to be restarted daily.

  • IS Apps
    • Wiki update in Jun/Jul
    • Consultative group taking Office365 forward.
    • Moving off ColdFusion
    • Windows 10 - only for select PCs.
    • CapturED

      Not due to be replaced until 2018. Will use Panopto for now but IS aren't going to support it.

  • College Server Room Group

    To meet to discuss SLA.

  • Exam paper preparation

    SharePoint is being used by HSS.

Reports from Units

• Infrastructure

• Managed Platform

  • systemd and dns component

    There have been problems with the dns component. See the report for full explanation of solution which has been pushed out to develop machines. Alastair runs a script to check the current state of bind on machines.

  • default KVM memory size

    This has been increased to 4GB. May be worth increasing memory for existing KVMs (which requires a full restart).

• Research and Teaching

• Services

  • New fileservers

    Alastair mentioned that the bios is now set to UEFI. This should be turned back to legacy mode.

• User Support

  • On-line exams

    With the lab machines being upgraded next week, we will need to test the on-line exam environment under 7.2 in advance of the August resits.

Topics for discussion

• None

• None

AOCB

• None

The next meeting will be on 8th June 2016 at 10:00 in IF-4.31, chaired by Craig.