Operational Meeting

Minutes of the meeting held on Wednesday 16th September 2020 on-line

Present:: Ross Armstrong, Anila Asif, Richard Bell, Toby Blake, Neil Brown, Tim Colles, Chris Cooke, Carol Dow, Alison Downie, Nick Dandoulakis, Ian Durkacz, Graham Dutton, Mitchell Hunter, Adam Kirylczuk, Mohammed Javaid, Jennifer Oxley, Stephen Quinney, Iain Rae, Gordon Reid, George Ross, Alastair Scobie, Craig Strachan (convener and minutes)

Minutes of the last meeting
The minutes for 9th September were approved.
Report from Computing Executive Group
Nothing to report.
Reports from Units
- Infrastructure
  1. Server room access arrangements
    Jennifer asked if User Support should deal with the initial stages of a request for access to the SMSR such as making sure that the person had undertaken all the appropriate training courses. George replied that this would be much appreciated.
  2. AT datacentre mailing list
  3. EdLAN
    Neil asked if under the new setup, we were required to co-ordinate our use of private address ranges with the rest of this University. George replied that this was so and that in addition, we also needed to do this for VLAN tags.
  4. eduroam
  5. DNS and RFC1918 addresses
    This was discussed at the end of the meeting. The general feeling appeared to be that there was no great appetite for change.
  6. New student accounts
- Managed Platform
  - SL7.8 upgrades
  - New KVM server
  Stephen reminded the meeting that he is now located back in the tower and is available for the rebooting of office workstations and similar tasks.
- Research and Teaching
  1. Nothing to report
- Services
  1. web.inf.ed.ac.uk login problems
  2. Student Quotas
  3. TBC-Disabling/removing student printers
    Craig will solicit Bjoern and NeilH's opinions on the matter.
  Jennifer asked the Unit to clarify whether users would only be accessing the HTTPS version of infweb to reach restricted areas or for editing. Neil replied that this was indeed the case.
- User Support
  1. CSOs working on-site
  2. Reception and deliveries
  3. CDT machines
  4. PGR desk allocations and moves
  5. AT labs
  6. Office 365 migrations
  7. Anila's 1 year anniversary
  Neil pointed out that some mailing lists depend on a user being allocated a desk and wondered whether in the current circumstances, some users might not be allocated desks? It would appear that for the moment at least, users are being allocated virtual desks but if there are any issues with mailing list membership, this should be borne in mind.
  
  There was some discussion about how to deal with the inevitable avalanche of students who have forgotten their password once the semester starts. It was agreed that the least bad option was to give such users the entitlement that would allow them to reset their password via the password portal. Alastair stated that this procedure should only be in place for the first month of the new semester.
Topics for discussion
None
Items for the Computing Systems blog
AOCB

Iain asked when we were likely to get access to the AT server room. George agreed to make enquiries.
Ian asked if we were going to reinforce the message that the support area was closed to callers? Alison said that she would be sending out an email to this effect.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be on Wednesday 23rd September 2020 online at 10am.

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