Operational Meeting

Minutes of the meeting held on Wednesday 9th December 2020 on-line

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

Minutes of the last meeting
The minutes for 2nd December were approved.
Actions and blog articles
Actions discussed:
- Deal with remaining machines with QuoVadis intermediate certificates
  Iain reported that he dealt with rt4 last night and hopes to do issrt tonight. They were the 2 pressing ones. The few remaining can wait until new year.
- Review nagios use
  RAT have dealt with a few. While the AT labs are on nagios, there will be lab machines popping up regularly but they are being dealt with as quickly as possible.
- Ask IS how they manage server room incidents
  There was much discussion on this. IS appear to work much as we do. We are generally happy with the way we currently work which relies on goodwill rather than on a rota basis. There are 2 main aspects to this - the mechanisms for monitoring and then the way issues are communicated. George pointed out that there is now a project to look into improving monitoring. Currently emails are sent to Alastair and Infrastructure with Alastair also receiving texts. It was suggested that Estates should be included.
- Review VMs
  More progress on this. US have one to delete. Agreed to add deadline of end Feb.
- Move computing staff desktop machines to Ubuntu
  Agreed to rename this action as computing staff to use Ubuntu as default platform. It is accepted that there will be a need for SL7 desktop machines to remain e.g. test server configurations.
- Remove unused kit from racks in IF, AT, KB
  George noted that Nick is developing a tool that will greatly help with this.
- Review "nograce" entitlements
  MPU, Inf and US done.
- Support staff accessing user's own machine to debug problems
  Alison will chase Angus.
- Sl7.8 upgrades by Christmas
  See Unit reports for progress. See also Stephen's email (9th Dec)
Actions added or revived:
- Review computing.help pages
Report from Computing Executive Group
- Congratulations to College TEL group
  Alex and Fiona are members of this group who were recently awarded one of the Principal's medals - congratulations to them both!
Reports from Units
- Infrastructure
  1. Server room access arrangements
    If you let in or chaperone someone, please also note your own name on the bookings wiki page. We may need this information in the we-hope-unlikely case that someone tests positive or shows symptoms.
  2. Fibre channel
  3. EdLAN
  4. IPv6 SLAAC-style addresses
  5. IPv6 and jumbo frames on the cluster wires
  6. OpenVPN and RFC1918 addresses
- Managed Platform
  - Ubuntu package service
  - Network config on Ubuntu
  - Libreoffice icon issues
  - Final release of 2020
    The last release will be Wed 9th Dec unless any security updates are considered essential next week.
- Research and Teaching
  1. SL7.8
  2. lcfg-postgresql schema 5/4.1
- Services
  1. Backups update
  2. HTTPS web.inf
- User Support
  1. office365 moves
  2. Office desktop Ubuntu upgrades
  3. SL7.8 server upgrades
  4. DDI registration for new MDPs has been tested
Topics for discussion
None
Items for the Computing Systems blog
- None
AOCB
Next meeting
The next meeting will be on Wednesday 16th December 2020 online at 10am.

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