Operational Meeting

The minutes for 16th December were approved.

Actions discussed:

• Review pages on computing.help

  All pages before July 2019. Deadline of end March 2021 agreed.

• Review nagios use

  Inf Unit done.

• Managing server room incidents

  There was much discussion over what had, and had not been agreed when this action was last discussed with recollections of said discussions varying widely. It seems clear however that the issue of how IS manage server room incidents is no longer germane and that an important aspect now is what kind of response we expect to incidents occurring out of office hours. The description of the action has therefore been changed and the convener agreed to raise this topic at CEG.

• Review VMs

  No progress.

• Remove unused kit from racks in IF, AT, KB

  Deadline of end March agreed.

• Review "nograce" entitlements

  Deadline of end February agreed.

Actions added or revived:

• Inf Unit to switch remote.inf and lab.inf DNS zones to be generated from entitlements rather than roles.

Actions completed:

• Deal with remaining machines with QuoVadis intermediate certificates.
• Computing staff to use Ubuntu by default.
• Have SL7.8 updates done by Christmas.

Blog articles completed

• Ubuntu desktop upgrades

Report from Computing Executive Group

• Nowt to report

Reports from Units

• Infrastructure

  1. Christmas holiday period debrief
  2. Server room access arrangements
  3. Forum server room UPS preventative maintenance visit.
  4. EdLAN
  5. DNS
  6. Unregistered MAC addresses
  7. Remote.inf and lab.inf

     Neil queried the use of roles, rather than entitlements in this process. Inf Unit agreed to fix this.

  8. Let's Encrypt root certificate change Jan 2021 - CANCELLED

• Managed Platform

  • SSH server crash
  • XRDP remote.inf service

• Research and Teaching

  1. Excellent progress being made with S2 teaching software
  2. RT5 development continues, along with a new RT4 instance for the SDP course. It's almost there, just waiting to get the email->new ticket interface sorted.

• Services

  1. Christmas disk failure
  2. SDP Group Website

• User Support

  1. office365 moves
  2. Office desktop Ubuntu upgrades
  3. On-site working

Topics for discussion

None

• None

AOCB

Neil ask in view of current and potentially more restrictive future lockdown restrictions how we should be arranging deliveries of items such as replacement disks. Carol replied that as things stood, Nik was in the Forum full time and deliveries could be directed to him.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 20th January 2021 online at 10am.