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Apologies for absence
Richard had sent his apologies.
These were accepted.
Matters arising:
Account Management Procedures
Roger has been asked to develop scripts to assist with account archiving.
Roger reported that he had made progress in writing perl scripts to assist the archiving of old accounts. He believed that they would be ready for testing by Front Line Support by the end of June.
Roger confirmed that the perl script should be ready for testing by User Support Unit staff by the end of the month. The development version of the script is currently at ~roger/bin/perl/archive-rsync.pl.
Roger had announced the availability of the script for evaluation on sphinx. Lindsey had done some initial experimentation/familiarisation with the script
Roger will investigate the process of transferring the archived material to tape and will then write a script to assist with this procedure. He will speak to Bill about the alternatives of using Networker, tar, cpio etc.
The Services Unit are considering using software other than Networker for doing backups in future. Networker also uses a proprietary format for writing the data to tape. Both of these facts are possible reasons for considering alternatives to Networker more seriously as a framework for archiving data. Roger will speak to Craig and others about the possibility of using amanda for archiving.
Roger has spoken briefly to Craig about this. Craig also favoured a non-proprietary tape format.
Since the Systems Unit will probably not be considering new backups technology for a few months yet and our need to archive data off the archive area onto tape is more urgent Ken suggested that we just use tar and produce a searchable index by creating a full tar listing on-line in a standard location (such files can then be searched using normal Unix tools like grep).
Roger should write the procedure fleshing out the details of the above. A wrapper script should be written if this seems most helpful for ease of use and to guarantee consistency of the on-line tar listings.
Roger had not had time to do much about this because of the annual leave that he had just taken and would not be able to spend much time in the immediate future because of the introductory talks that he gives to incoming students. He should be able to start on it by the next meeting.
Roger reported that a first pass at the wrapper script was just about ready. It was agreed that this work needed to be given higher priority because it was blocking the archiving of data on the archive areas which were effectively full. Roger will liaise with Lindsey over the testing of the script
Lindsey and Roger have met and considered the functionality provided by the scripts that Roger has written and some modifications have been agreed. There was also some discussion about whether or not it would be wise to use the tape host that is controlled by the Networker backup software and it was concluded that it would be preferable to use a separate tape drive on a separate tape host. Ken mentioned that he thought the Services Unit had such a spare tape drive on the JCMB site for resilience.
Ken asked Roger to make the agreed changes to the scripts by the end of this week and load the software onto the spare tape host (if it existed), so that Lindsey could start to use it. He should make the scripts available as an rpm by the end of the following week.
Roger applied the changes to the scripts. Lindsay was busy until recently so testing was delayed. The scripts were tested on a small amount of data (approximately 1GB) and then yesterday the scripts were used to archive the 170GB archive partition. This took nearly 20 hours to complete. The tape needs to be verified and a second copy made and verified and then the data can be deleted.
Further testing should be made on smaller quantities of data to optimise the block size used.
University account/uun management
Lindsey reported that there were unclear procedures for handling IDMS related data changes when a visitor leaves. This will also be discussed at the meeting being called by Ken (see above).
This will need to be followed up.
A draft procedure needs to be drawn up and then accepted at the Service Managers meeting.
Another, perhaps more important, point was raised by Lindsey, namely requesting the re-use of a uun by a returning visitor. Ken will mention the IDMS training course at the next Service Managers meeting.
Ken reported that the July Service Managers meeting had been cancelled. He will bring this up at the August meeting.
The August meeting of the Service Managers was also cancelled.
Ken briefly mentioned these issues at the September Service Manager's meeting the week before. He will raise it again once the new IDMS system goes live (in October?).
IDMS Release 1 has now been launched. The next meeting of the Service Managers should be on November 7th. Ken will meet briefly with Alison to confirm what we would like the admin staff to do differently with respect to recording data on the visits of people to the School. Ken will suggest that those admin staff who record staff records should receive IDMS training.
Ken tabled a brief note at this morning's Service Managers meeting mentioning:
AFS home directories for computing staff
Roger passed on a reminder from the AFS project that all computing staff were to have an AFS directory by the end of this month.
Lindsey and Richard reported that on logging in they get a warning message that some initialisation file is missing. This needs to be investigated and the findings passed back to the AFS project staff.
Roger should document any helpful information concerning AFS accounts to assist User Support Staff in resolving issues.
Roger has started this but it is ongoing. He will create a link to the existing documentation on AFS for computing staff from the Support Procedures web page.
Roger reported that he had created the link. There was some discussion about whether this documentation could also be used for normal users or whether something focused on managing and using ACLs (Access Control Lists) for directories would be preferable for them.
It was agreed that a brief summary of the relevant commands would be very helpful.
Roger has created the summary and will mail round details.
Non-Informatics students and the old_accounts script
Lindsey pointed out that students doing non-Informatics programmes of study who have done one of our courses would not be listed by the old_accounts script until they had normally finished their programme of study. Ken will see whether he can modify the script to handle them specially.
Mac support
We have been asked by CEG to start producing documentation to assist users of self-managed Macs. A Mac Powerbook was ordered for the User Support Unit and this has been given to Roger with the intention that he create the above documentation. He has started to get familiar with the Mac Powerbook. Ken suggested that this kind of documentation might well benefit from the expertise of existing Mac users on the staff and we should consider using a wiki to host it. Roger will do the initial setting up of the FAQ part of the documentation.
Roger has had some exploratory conversations with Toby and other Mac users.
Roger was asked to speak to Paul and mail computing staff in general to ask for areas of Mac use that should be documented and to solicit useful pieces of advice about using Macs.
Roger has set up a web page for holding information on Mac related topics. He has contacted computing staff to request content for the page and has responses from both Toby and Paul. He has yet to link in the page from the support web pages.
Staff and lab FC5 installations progress.
The last remaining student lab machines (13 machines in JCMB-1501) were upgraded to FC5 last week.
Alison reported the following figures for the numbers of staff/PhD machines still at FC3:
| Site | At FC3 |
|---|---|
| AT | 4 |
| BP | 0 |
| FH | 3 |
| KB | 32 |
| Total | 39 |
Upgrades of User Support Unit servers
Roger, Morna and Alison had already agreed between themselves who would upgrade each server except for diglett. Morna offered to upgrade diglett and explained that bu.inf should not be upgraded at present since it would be fc3.login.inf.
The machines still at FC3 will be upgraded as follows:
| Alison | mars mars1 mars2 mars3 mars4 mars5 mars6 mimas neptune pluto sannox saturn1 saturn2 scooter titan venus |
|---|---|
| Morna | beefy bunnocks diglett goldfinch goshawk grebe slim statler waldorf |
| Roger | alina draga lenin limba ratte roseval |
Ken believed that the documentation was adequate for our needs and asked others to read it, especially Alison. If nobody objects Ken will respond to Graham and Tim at the end of this week that we are happy to sign off the documentation and start providing front line support for the Postgresql Account Self-Service server.
There was some discussion about the CSOs being out of touch with what is being developed within the other units. It was suggested that each CSO be associated with one of the other units and attend their meetings. Ken will consult with other unit managers at CEG on this suggestion.
All seemed quite agreeable to taking on responsibility for the tasks listed by Craig that would otherwise be the responsibility of the Services Unit.
Alison will copy the description of the tasks from the old group locations to the User Support Unit web pages and link them into the Support Procedures for Informatics web page.
AOCB
Broken profiles
Ken read out a list of hosts with broken profiles, many of them laptops, that had been collated by Chris. Ken will forward the list to Alison for action. If a host is still in use then it must be changed to include the self-managed header, otherwise the unallocated or junk header should be used.
AT Air Conditioning
George had requested that the AT support staff keep an eye on the temperature in the AT machine room until the air conditioning is fixed. Ken will mail George with an alternative suggestion since there are no support staff based at Appleton Tower at present and the only people with access to the machine room are not based at Appleton Tower.
Pending
There was some discussion about what categories to use for RT tickets under the new management structure. It is possible to have per-queue categories so these could be left to the discretion of the queue owner. Alison was asked to come up with a basic logical and consistent set of categories to use from now on since the current set is a miscellany of broad and very specific categories many of which are probably never used.
Queues have been created for the new units and other queues that have no new or open tickets in them have been disabled. Work has started on deciding how to rationalise the categories used.
Alison has discovered that some of the RT configuration for types of selection boxes for queries on categories etc have been changed. She is going to investigate changed and new features further before finalising the new categories.
Alison has made some changes to the custom fields in the current version of RT (environment and Machine Type have been added for example). She has disabled some old queues which are no longer to be used. On further investigation there is not a problem with displaying a large number of possible values in a drop down selection list for a custom field in the new RT release. We will probably be using RT 3.6 when the service is ported to FC5. Any further work on changing custom fields will be postponed until the service moves to FC5.
Storing the spare machines
Further clarification is needed about:
how/when delivered machines get into the inventory in order facilitate keeping track of spare/pool stock.
Alastair agreed to take over this action from Jeremy.
Alastair has been discussing this with Sheila.
There have been problems finding a suitable model of PC to order for spares and for allocation to new members of staff. The Dell GX270 is no longer available. The HP model that was the chosen machine for University Windows machines runs DICE but is now at its End of Life. It was thought that we could order a significant number of these but this may not now be possible. Alastair has just identified another HP model that may be suitable but he will need a sample machine to test.
Alastair has ordered 50 HP D530 machines in late December (but this model has now been discontinued).
Ken will speak to Alastair about agreeing a more realistic deadline (since Alastair's highest priority will now be working on the FC3 port)
This action has also been discussed at CEG. The deadline has been postponed till the third week in June.
Sheila reported that 100 HP DC7100 computers had been ordered with 17" LCD screens and delivery was expected either by the end of this week or some time next week. She also mentioned that there were 100 NEC LCD monitors that had recently been acquired; they were in store in JCMB.
Alastair said that he wanted to postpone this work until the School had moved to the new Informatics Forum in 2 years time. It is likely that the way the inventory is maintained and kept up-to-date would be very different in the new building. This action is now moved to a Pending section of the minutes.
Liaison with Services Unit over the Backups Review.
Ross will contact the Services Unit with a view to being involved in any requirements capture for the replacement backups system, so that the views and experience of members of the Front Line Support team (such as himself) are taken into account.
Ross has spoken to Bill about this and the Services Unit will not be considering the issue before December. This action is thus moved to the pending list.
Windows AFS client software
Morna should investigate when we should install the Windows AFS client on MDP machines.
Morna has mailed the Services Unit to ask whether admin staff were going to be moved to AFS (in particular the CISA admin staff). We won't install the AFS client by default.
Morna spoke to the services unit who said that admin-staff will not be moved to AFS until they can be offered a single login - ie logging on to windows without separate kerberos/AFS login/signon requirements. Roger and Simon are looking at this apparently.
This work is effectively blocked until the Services unit are ready to give AFS home directories to admin staff. It is consequently moved to the pending section.
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