ACO Meeting Minutes December 10, 2015

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on December 10, 2015

Present:  D. Keenan, J. Simpson, S. Hartung, K. McGowan, S. Speers, N. Bromley, J. Schildroth, L. Tomalty, C. Wallace

Co-ops:   L. Kim, M. Shuttleworth, M. Smith

Regrets:  H. Balagtas, S. Paterson, T. Marshall-Taylor

  • Dawn
    • On Monday, December 14 two new co-ops, Sean Lee and Javaira Asif, will be job shadowing.
    • Tim Grace has left Renison. David Annable is continuing to provide support to the College.
    • CTSC updates:
      • CNSC meetings to be reduced to once a term plus additional meetings as needed.
      • Lab locking in Engineering reported to be working well. The custom-built system used by Engineering Computing may be opened up to broader campus use next term.
      • IDAM RFP has been posted and will close in January. ope to have a decision by Spring 2016.
  •  Sherry
    • First stage of course evaluations completed and sent to IST for scanning.
    • Work on sessional computer requirements is almost complete. RT tickets for specific requests will be created soon.
  • Lydia
    • Working on Professional Development presentation.
  • Mercedez
    • Working on Professional Development presentation.
    • Keyboards have been cleaned in PAS 1098.
      • Keyboards in PAS 1237 will also need to be cleaned.
  • Madeline
    • Preparing for Professional Development presentation next week.
    • Work on bulletin board project is wrapping up.
    • Reviewing ACO site for any necessary updates.
  • Keith
    • Updated a number of WordPress sites.
    • Continuing work on machine room cleanup. Twelve systems are ready to be surplussed.
    • Acrobat Pro DC upgrade for laptops has been a challenge. IST Webstore requires a machine name, but laptops may not have a DNS name. Using the server name as the hostname seems to work. Will follow up with Will Lewis for a solution.
    • Added PPOCIR Workshop documents (English and French) to WordPress site for Bob Kerton’s weekend workshop.
    • Have prepared a list of department Xerox copiers with sharenames, hostnames, IPs and models. Will upload this information to SharePoint.
    • Users with admin accounts on Macs, who install Firefox from the Mozilla site, rather than installing the ESR version available through Munki may find that they are unable to authenticate to SharePoint with the current version (40). The newest developer version works so I suspect that once these versions become mainstream the issue may resolve itself.
    • Reminder to complete the WatITis post conference survey.
    • Student email in the Cloud has gone to RFP. Will be closed in early January.
  • Sean
    • cantus.uwaterloo.ca was having issues where it was exhausting its memory. After Sean determined the queries causing the issue, the site admin realized a change to a Drupal view had caused the issue. This has been rectified.
    • Chrome, Skype, Flash, Office 2011 updates for Macs have been completed.
    • Debugged kinema.uwaterloo.ca issue for Jan Udhe. Publications are done Spring and Fall. ACO should look into moving the site off Watarts.
    • Office 2016 added to optional installs for all Desktop/Laptop Macs through Munki.
    • In PAS 2030, the VGA pin 15 was bent in the line to the projector, resulting in problems for a thesis defense. Pin was bent back and is working. Presenters can alternatively use a mini-displayport cable, which is available at the Help Desk. HDMI is not advisable.
    • Conrad Grebel and Renison evaluation results have been processed. Online results for Arts also processed. Verified all text in student comments has been downloaded.
    • Worked on WordPress updates.
  • Nevil
    • In the process of testing the new Cleanc version. Bill provided useful suggestions including a new feature request.
    • Account cleanup for Artshome shares is continuing before DFS is re-enabled on Cygnus.
    • To prepare for exams in PAS 1237 this week, Learn was tested individually with no issues.  Once 300+ students across campus used Learn at the same time, it was slow in labs where the ONA firewall tool was used. Removing the exam lockdown allowed students to complete the exam normally. Additional IP addresses to exempt from the block have been gathered with help from IST.
    • St. Paul’s spc-starrez-sql drive had a space issue due to vendor upgrades. The problem was corrected Sunday.
    • LAPS will be implemented in all ACO-managed labs next week. Last week it was enabled on Vanguard machines.
    • Do not test Skype or Flash software as the upgrade did not go through. Flash upgrade is to be rescheduled for tonight, December 10th.
    • John Jaworsky had a printing problem with print drivers. This issue and its multi-step solution were documented from a previous occurrence. Following the procedure fixed the problem.
  • Jameson
    • Continuing to work on cleaning up old and missing Nexus computers.
    • Reading up and improving knowledge on Windows PowerShell in order to continue working on improving the Nexus Security Groups PowerShell script.
  • Lisa
    • Helped Geoff Hayes merge several Word documents into one.
    • ACO classroom key fob yearly renewal has been completed.
    • We had 48 attendees for the ACO Lunch Session. Slides will be made available online. Thank you to all who helped and presented, and thank you also to Lydia for monitoring the Skype communication.
    • Please provide uPrint feedback to Lisa by Friday, Dec. 11th.
    • Set up a new WordPress site https://artsweb.uwaterloo.ca/historyblog/ for History.