ACO Meeting Minutes November 22, 2018

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on November 22, 2018

Present:  S. Hartung, B. Baer, R. Park, K. McGowan, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, S. Paterson, J. Schildroth, T. Marshall-Taylor

Co-ops:   S. Luckhurst, A. Sanchez, O. Vakomies

Regrets:  W. Lewis, M. Byerley, C. Wallace

Attendees:

  • Sherry
    • Fall 2018 Course Evaluations are underway. Of 717 Arts courses, only 59 or 8.2% will be completed on paper. Three additional paper requests decided to remain online after second thought, and one additional paper request rejected due to the lateness of their request.
    • Working on ACO expenses to budget.
  • Bill B.
    • Glad to be back in ACO and available for ACO staff.
  • Bob
    • The next phase of the Online Course Evaluation Project is to work on the questions used in Course Evaluations to have consistency across campus. Currently, Math and Engineering use different questionnaires than used in Arts, Environment and Science. Much work has been done with focus groups to research question wording and dividing the questions between the course and the instructor. Currently there is a Pilot Project chaired by Dr. David DeVidi which will run parallel Pilot Project questionnaires along with the Fall 2018 Course Evaluations. The Pilot Project questionnaires will be separate from the normal Course Evaluations and will be analyzed separately. They will not included in Faculty and Department results, and ACO will not be involved in running any results for the Pilot Project. See Bob if there are any questions.
  • Oliver
    • OFAS Project update:
      • New functionality is being added to the site, allowing a log in and log out, edit profile, CRUD job postings, etc.
      • A live development site is available. It is updated periodically with the upgrades. Feel free to test it out.
      • Any feedback or upgrade suggestions are welcome.
  • Samuel
    • Replacing engl-sess-10179 and psci-sess-8983 Lenovo models with newer Dell models.
    • Eight PCs still need to be updated to Windows 10.
    • Attending SLP course today from 2:00PM to 4:30PM so will be away from the HelpDesk.
  • Angelica
    • Meeting with Science Computing went well. Discussed the progress of the tutorial videos and how we plan on doing the Scinage documentation.
    • Working on editing previous videos and creating new tutorial videos based on Troy Grandy’s and Mirko Vucicevich's feedback.
    • Working on ACO Newsletter Feature Images.
    • Updated phone contacts list and distributed during the meeting.
  • Keith
    • SAF wants to do phishing research to study psychological traits and susceptibility of phishing, and requested that it comes from ACO. Should come from SAF as it is their students doing the testing.
    • CS has requested Windows logs. Lawrence Folland sent the script they wish to use. Looking into whether it works and is appropriate for the information provided.
    • New cert for artsadmin installed.
    • New cert for arts.uwaterloo.ca requested.
    • Some issues with new VPN appliance if someone hasn’t connected in a while. The client is too old to connect and the secure login server not found. Reinstall can fix the issue. Fixes should be documented for future issues.
    • New retail services digital display installed for SAF to highlight donations. Still want to do something in the HH hub that ACO controls. Wendy Philpott has done a walk-through of the area to determine where the monitor should go, and needs to find funding. The display technology is working well and others are noticing and are impressed.
  •  Herbert
    • The 2018 WatITis conference is being held on December 4th. There are many good topics. Please register for WatITis at .
    • CALMS update:
      • Presented to IST.
      • Discussion in meeting on a proposed feature of storing BitLocker/FileVault keys for assets. Will limit access to certain roles, and be encrypted on the database to maintain security.
      • Psych to be set up to allow access to view assets own owned by Psychology department.
  • Sean
    • Upgraded Bacula server from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 after testing. Upgrade required a lot of manual intervention but we are now good to add 18.04 Bacula clients.
    • artsweb migrated from 14.04 to 18.04.
    • arts-ofas3 18.04 server created for Herbert to migrate to as current OFAS machine is 14.04.
    • Built a cantus2 18.04 server where the cantus group will create a new setup as the production cantus server is running 14.04.
    • New issue with ICMP on Macs older than 10.12 prompted me to go forward with my plans to move Gosling from macOS to Linux. Used retired ESXi server to build a new Gosling. It is now in production and backed up by Bacula.
    • Added macOS 10.14.1 installer to Munki. Published as an optional install if people want to upgrade.
    • Online TA evaluations setup for FR and SPAN.
    • EXSi servers have been patched for the critical Vmware hypervisor bug.
    • Agora upgraded from 14.04 to 18.04. Migrated all sites to new platform. Switched from suEXEC PHP via FastCGI to PHP-FPM on demand pools per Virtual Host.
    • Clean-up of watarts in preparation for migration to 18.04. Deleting unused accounts, web sites and databases that are no longer in use. All backed up in case someone asks.
    • Converting old PHP code that made use of MySQL extension to use MySQL extension, MySQL extension was removed in PHP 7.0. Fixed voting, ACQ, and course approval. Also lunch form updated. I've password protected the lunch form as it's not very secure. XSS and SQL injection vulnerable. Lunch form written 15 years ago, so maybe a good project for a co-op to rewrite.
    • Created ketos.uwaterloo.ca Centos 7 machine to host older PHP code giving Christina Vester more time to get it updated. Site will not work with PHP 7+ and is currently on watarts. Centos 7 is not EOL until 2024 and runs PHP 5.4. Classics uses this in teaching courses.
    • Built Xymon client RPM from source for use on Centos machines.
  • Nevil
    • Nxsartsapp to Artsprint printer migration script in place for Vanguard. No issues, only success reported.
    • SAF has hired a new Financial Lab Manager to Start in January 2019.
    • Rotman Interactive Trader was reported as not working on the weekend, then confirmed as working. Jeremie Fortin is following up.
  • Scott
    • Met with Science with Angelica concerning documentation (video and document) of Scinage.
    • Updated PsychoPy and Veracrypt for Psychology.
    • Met with Brenda Brazier regarding TaxPrep for next year (Alan Macnaughton is retiring).
    • Stata update request (14 IC to 15IC) from Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme. Checked with Economics to make sure it will not adversely affect them. Received quote and awaiting purchase in order to package up. Discussion concerning this, and given it is for teaching, we should go ahead with purchase per Robert Park.
    • Helped Anne Marie Miraglia with discount site for a personal Dell purchase.
    • Set up hallway digital display NUC with a TightVNC server so we can remote in to fix any small issues.
    • Two recently imaged systems were initiating a new CCM cache in "C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\x64\3\Xerox\Product Data\Public\DCPs\x3UNIV0N\V5.0\Windows\ccmcache" for some reason. Both have been re-imaged.
    • Co-op feedback will be sent out today to get feedback for performance reviews for Fall 2018 co-ops.
  • Jameson
    • Investigated power issues with HH280-49 as reported by Jeremie Fortin. Turned out power cable was not plugged into PC properly. Once plugged back in, computer seemed to work normally.
    • Jennifer Reddock reported missing apps from her start menu (alarms, calculator). There are known issues with Windows 10 and start menu when using roaming profiles in which the system doesn't properly create the index of programs. Deleting the local copy of the profile does seem to correct the issue.
    • Created a demo site for Vanguard Application Software Testing (VAST).
    • Researched and spec'd out a TV and mobile cart for English. Waiting for their response and go head to order.
    • Packaged and updated Antidote to 9.5.3.
    • [GI-IT] - Continued work on Self-Serve Admin Portal. Built Add User function, Disable/Enable User function which makes the corresponding changes in AD.
  • Todd
    • ML 117 projector lamps have been purchased, received and replaced.
    • ML 117 arm caps for chairs have to be changed regularly as they are easily damaged. Plant Ops has standard arm caps kept in stock to used across campus. It is easier now to get them replaced quickly.
    • Hiring lab staff through IWS program for Winter term.
    • There is a current RT to change the sound processor in ML 117 as it fails regularly. A hard boot (unplugging and plugging back int) is required to fix it, but it needs to be replaced. Will need two at approximately $5,600. Need to determine funding.