ACO Meeting Minutes January 25, 2018

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on January 25, 2018

Present:  S. Hartung, R. Park, K. McGowan, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, S. Paterson, J. Schildroth, G. Parks, W. Lewis, T. Marshall-Taylor,

Co-ops:   A. Sanchez, L. Ma, S. Luckhurst

Regrets:  B. Baer (on secondment), M. Byerley, C. Wallace

Attendees:

    • Working on finances for upcoming budget talks with the Dean's Office.
    • Work to determine eligibility for staff rollover 2018 is awaiting the finance work before this can be started.
    • Working on info gathering to set up W18 online course evaluations. Technical Writer cannot help with this task as students are not allowed access to administrative functions on eValuate. Intent is to have department admins set up in eValuate to add their department courses.
    • Angelica helped to update the Take Home sheets in CALMS. Thank you for your quick work on that project.
    • Angelica will be helping to update the Master Faculty Member list. This requires a number of steps, so I will plan out the work so she can get started.
  • Keith
    • CTSC report (meeting two weeks prior)
      • New WatIAm 2.0 March implementation will result in new roles and change in management. Most of ACO will have an Identity Manager role including the Help Desk and an Onboarding Manager (Keith and Nevil). Training will mandatory. Friday morning’s seminar will be about WatIAM so attendance is encouraged.
      • Multiple issues were reported with Retail Services installation of printer/copiers, Much resulted from communications issues.
      • Status of SquirrelMail postponed to next meeting held January 25th.
      • Spectre and Meltdown discussed. Over this last week, the microcode updates have been suspended. Sean will address this further.
    • One failed artsstore1 hard drive replaced and RAID rebuilt. Yesterday, a second predictive failure disk was replaced, so artsstore 1 is back in working order.
    • Noticed a number of users who previously had VPN access losing that access – not sure why.
    • PAS 1237 now open 24/7.
    • There is a change to the Take Home computer policy. It will be posted on WCMS. Anyone who chooses a laptop at rollover is no longer eligible for a take home machine as a laptop is portable and can be used on campus and at home. As rollovers continue, if a previous take home machine was a laptop, it will be about eight plus years old and should probably be surplused.
    • PaperCut MF and Retail Services. The ACO printer will be set up on the development system for testing purposes. Push out would have a one-time cost plus ongoing costs, so further determination is required before implementing to departments.
    • Access to SoftChoice purchase of Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server go to an unknown MS Business Centre portal. Sandra Laughlin is trying to trace it. Will bring it up at today’s CTSC meeting.
    • Evaluate data bug where some duplicates occurred in the log .42 seconds of each other. The number is small (.8%). Some duplicates have been removed but it is difficult to identify seven further duplicates.
    • Met with Blake Phillips to determine how to support SAF IT. They are looking for help in deployment process. Storage needs are greater than most other departments.
    • High level discussions are currently taking place concerning the data bug in eVvaluate. Science has been able to successfully implement a fix. Faculty of Arts Chairs have been informed. Once discussions are completed with a solution, results from eValuate will likely be rerun and need to be redistributed. Direct all questions to Bob Park.
  • Lee
    • Lori Curtis asked to fix her printer but did not give specifics about what was wrong. It arrived in a big box with old manuals and cables which will be recycled.
    • Will be helping in February for the 3 Minute Thesis and wondering what kinds of things are needed? Scott advised to contact Rick denBroeder in ITMS (EC2). He will provide training. Will need to set up project and slides, and use count down timer for each presenter.
    • Working on making web app templates mobile responsive.
    • Continuing with Lynda.com courses.
    • There have been a lot of students coming to the Help Desk for help setting up SPSS.
  • Samuel
    • RT# 736712 – Computer assets department inventory:
      • Finished updating CALMS for Anthropology department.
      • Began updating CALMS for Sociology yesterday, waiting on email from Admin about when offices that were busy can be re-visited.
    • Using interactions with faculty when updating CALMS to work towards improving communication skills and time management.
    • Continuing Lynda.com courses to reach other goals.
  • Angelica
    • RT ticket #755413 Update Rollover Take Home Policy on ACO Website. Sherry will close time once reviewed.
    • Door to PAS 1237 has been closed a number of times. Discussion:
      • Sherry sent an email to users to advise to leave room open.
      • Sherry will also send an email to custodial staff.
      • Sherry will return PAS 1237 key so door can be unlocked as needed.
      • Security cameras to be included in upcoming budget to monitor room use.
    • Updating CALMS and ACO website, and attending SEW courses really helps with goals. Sherry to review wording for take home computer policy and publish page.
  • Herbert
    • Assisting Margaret Ulbrick (ENG) with OFAS.
    • Setup live OFAS URL for Juli-Ann Sanuto (Dean of Arts).
    • Recovering iMac after failed upgrade for John North (ENG).
    • Advanced Search page for CALMS.
  • Sean
    • Our *file[up] shares now exceed 10TB, which is beyond the capacity of Cygnus, so I've removed it as a backup destination in our nightly backups.
    • Wrote an R script to generate self-study statistics more quickly for departments. Used for GBDA and French requests.
    • Created APFS and HFS images for 10.13.3 for use on DeployStudio. Also updated DS to support High Sierra.
    • Old rollover laptop imaged and given to Advancement Office to replace an old Lenovo that only had 2GB RAM.
    • Dropbox, Firefox and the new unified code-base Office 2016 updates deployed to Macs.
    • Sherri Anne Arsenault in Advancement Office starting a secondment in PSCI on Monday replacing Marina Ivanova who is on leave. Jennifer Doucet from Math replaces Sherri Anne on February 2nd.
    • packalen requested econ research server (nonrival) be moved back from Linux to Windows, just waiting for him to buy a license.
    • Microcode updates on hold after completing two of three thanks to Intel's "more frequent reboots" after the microcode update. Most vendors including VMWare have pulled those patches or bios updates.
  • Nevil
    • Windows Advanced Upgrade Group to get available 1703 upgrade today.
    • Last week started testing BitLocker MBAM. Future image process changed to automatically encrypt hard drives.
  • Scott
    • 3 Minute Thesis help request from Wendy Philpott.
    • St. Paul's upgrade to Raisers Edge.
    • HH 280 upgrade to Win 10 1703 on April 26th.
    • CALMS Database update underway (RT 736721/736714). Have had a good response by departments done so far.
    • Co-op interviews for two Computing Assistants to be done all day on January 30th. Keith and Nevil to review applicants. Cynthia coming back next term. She will be the Work Placement. Looking at a third work term student in the next fiscal.
    • Upgrading machines for St. Paul’s from Windows 7 to 10.
  • Jameson
    • Task Sequence to apply BIOS update to fix Spectre done and working. Additional testing while waiting for additional BIOS updates to become available. Looking to deploy sometime in February.
    • [GI-IT] Automating Printer Installation and writing documentation on how to set up Xerox Printer.
    • [GI-IT] Updated SPSS installation to v25.0
    • [GI-IT] User Account creations/System Imaging.
  • Greg
    • Completed Professional Development presentation to group on January 18th.
    • Work on understanding how to integrate Xerox and PaperCuts. Accounting method will be easier than current system used for Xerox fleet machines.
    • Continuing to rename Psychology printers in DNS.
    • Xerox scan to network settings for French Studies.
  • Todd
    • Alarm system battery was changed.
    • Modification of lab ML 109 and ML 113 schedules Fridays 11:30am.
    • Incorrect charge on Pcard resulted in wrong account code used. This is being corrected. Also looking into software charge to lab. Potentially same problem.
    • Renison ELI booking in ML 109.
    • Additional booking for GER 303 in ML 109. Requires Skype. To look into one connection or multiple. May need to load test wireless.
    • Spanish has changed how they handle labs with one person (retired professor) taking care of everything.
    • Studies in Islam tutorial to remain at Renison.
  • Will
    • Asked that all of ACO and Psych IT be included in training for new MANI networking standard. Also asked for information on schedule and timing. Waiting for more information. Will pass along as received.
    • Outlook bug when forwarding attachments in a plain-text email, caused by Windows update on January 22nd. Fix has been issued by Microsoft and will be in the next cycle of patches.