Operational Meeting

These were approved.

Actions discussed:

• Complete upgrade of multi-user servers to SL7.6

  Ongoing, most Units have started

• Complete upgrade of remaining servers to SL7.6

  Ongoing, some Units have started

• Ask IS how they manage server room incidents

  Having spoken to Kenny, Alastair reported that they appear to be in a similar situation to us. There is a University policy which Alastair will circulate to COs

• Check progress on remote resits with Tim

  Craig assured us that the matter is in hand. Alison noted that the member of staff in ITO who deals with resit exams wasn't aware of this.

• Pandemic Planning

  Still a number of pages to be read by interested parties.

• Review pages in computing.help

  Only RAT, CEG and Infrastructure left. Review date now extended to cover all pages last reviewed in 2017.

• Produce "Get started" guide for new O365 users

  Ongoing - will be ready for next batch of moves. It was noted that if we don't schedule before the middle of August, Academics will need to be deferred. RAs can still go ahead at any time.

Actions added or revived:

• Review "nograce" entitlements

Actions (re-)deferred:

• SMSR power down - create an Emergency page on computing.help

  Defer for 3 months (until UPS work complete and Ian back)

Actions completed:

• Check which services depend on the staff role and Linux group
• Consider which further entitlements should be removed from the staff role

Blog articles suggested:

• A further article on the power down plans

Report from Computing Executive Group

1. Data-centre audit

   Tartarus can provide most of the information, including the purpose/role of a server by a combination of profile.group and profile.comment.

Reports from Units

• Infrastructure

  1. Forum server room UPS replacement/Forum 'building' UPS removal

     We need to decide if we prefer the shut down of the main Forum server room on the 20th of July to happen in the morning or afternoon.

  2. Holiday season

     The Unit will be below its usual strength until middle of August.

• Managed Platform

  • New KB KVM server
  • Memory use of VMS on KVM servers

    When you need to radically increase the amount of memory a VM uses, or make a new big-memory VM, could you please let mp-unit know? Big increases in memory use will make us want to move VMs about to keep the resource use balanced across the KVM servers.

• Research and Teaching

  1. teaching software

     40GB is about to be distributed to lab machines using /disk/scratch and group space.

  2. vim again

• Services

  1. More JBODS

     They may be installed on Saturday 20th July if HBAs arrive in time.

  2. Planned Cloud Printing Downtime

     This went to plan!

• User Support

  1. Resit exams

     Dates and times have been announced. See wiki page for more details. We are unlikely to need CO help on the day.

Topics for discussion

• None

A further article about UPS work in the Forum

AOCB

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 24th July 2019 in IF-4.31 (or possibly G.03) at 10:00.