ACO Meeting Minutes November 26, 2015

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on November 26, 2015

Present:  D. Keenan, S. Hartung, K. McGowan, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, S. Paterson, J. Schildroth, L. Tomalty, T. Marshall-Taylor, C. Wallace

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

Regrets:  J. Simpson

  • Dawn
    • Science is not running lab exams for Accounting in the Fall final exam period.
    • Preparing to hire Finance Research and Teaching Lab Manager with SAF, pending HR approval.
    • Stratford Media Technician position has been advertised.
    • Reminder to staff: add or update your photo for https://uwaterloo.ca/arts-computing/about/people/ and the bulletin board outside of ACO. Anyone with no photo, an out of data photo, or a photo with insufficient resolution will have a photo taken by Madeline.
    • Teaching labs currently have STATA version 12, which is no longer supported by the vendor.  Looking at upgrading to version 14 if it is still required.
  • Sherry
    • Gearing up for course evaluation processing. Temporary help starting on Monday to process forms.
    • Gathering data for sessional computer requirements. Expect to have enough information to start replacing sessional computers soon.
  • Lydia
    • Continuing work on Asset Management Lifecycle Rollover project.
  • Mercedez
    • Working on updates for Asset Management Lifecycle Rollover project.
  • Madeline
    • Work on bulletin board posters two thirds complete. Final third involves pictures of ACO staff.
  • Keith
    • Patched Cygnus over a weekend to re-enable DFS.
    • Rebooted aco-esxi-1 to clear a memory warning.  System came up clean, so suspect power rather than hardware was the cause.
    • Patch Adama and updated the DeployStudio and Server software. Runtime DeployStudio USB keys need to be updated in conjunction with this upgrade.
    • Time Machine drive on Adama was too small. Will install a larger (2 TB) external backup drive once enclosure case received.
    • Cleared some space on Adama by removing older work directories from Fine Arts projects and outdated DeployStudio masters.
    • Re-commissioned Aco-esxi-2 as Cogito2 to replace Cogito as the Bacula controller.
    • Fixing Munki installations that have been preventing Macs from getting timely software updates.
    • Cleaned several old servers out of the machine room. Old servers are ready for surplus.
  • Herbert
    • Re-imaging Macbook Pro for Paul Cegys. It had been freezing frequently. Based on information from MacTUG, upgrading to El Capitan when there is Adobe Creative Cloud installed could have caused the issue.  
    • Philosophy is now using OFAS. SAF has 3 new positions using the multiple committees feature for each job.
    • Awaiting feedback from Lennart with regards to the software he would like to purchase.
    • Working on updates to departmental printing stats & CALMS.
  • Sean
    • Converted seven of the nine Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7; two active sites that use web forms (SAF and AUO) remain. Created a Drupal 7 lite theme for the UW common look and feel, LDAP replaced with CAS.  
    • Built a Centos 7 system abbott.uwaterloo.ca for the Cantus group. The server will run Apache Solr to perform indexing for the Cantus site.
    • Cleaned up about ten Munki clients that were missing their authentication token after using Migration Assistant. Whitelisted the IP addresses temporarily then created a package to force installation.
    • Cleaned up Munki reports: removed out of date computers and duplicates from the database. Added serial numbers to make searching easier for pushing out software in future.
    • Skype has been updated for Macs.
    • Set up French online TA evaluations for this term. Because they use custom questions, these evaluations cannot yet be done in eValuate.
    • Added ECONSOC Wordpress site to our Wordpress network.
  • Nevil
    • Cygnus -> Cygnus2 DFS replication has been re-enabled after patching. System is back in testing mode.
    • Will perform cleanup of old user data before adding shares to be replicated.
    • Working on a new version of Cleanc.
    • SWORDC is effectively down since Tuesday afternoon, with Statistics Canada DNS servers and DC unreachable. After chasing down current contacts, have a ticket open with Statistics Canada’s Network group.
    • LAPS implementation for Vanguard will proceed on Monday. These systems will have no ACO admin account and the administrator account will be renamed as discussed.
  • Scott
    • Psychopy 1.83.01 package has been reworked. Now waiting for testing by Psychology.
    • Waiting to hear from Psych on the following applications: Psychtoolbox, GPower, Veracrypt.
    • Nxsartsts ran out of space. Nevil cleaned up some profiles. Moved a partition and expanded it with Bootrec. Updated all software available through the terminal server. People could not log on to the thin clients due to lack of disk space. Event logs indicate the server had been in that state for three weeks.  Monitoring for disk space has been updated to provide a warning in case of recurrence.
  • Jameson
    • Finished Powershell Script to report on security group changes, now fixing the forma of the report. Also looking into consolidating the reports into one instead of a report for each security group, as well as adding Arts computers from the webstore.
    • Working on identifying and cleaning up Nexus computers that have gone missing, based on information including MAC addresses and last known physical location.
    • Replaced projector in PAS 2030 with a spare. The old projector will be sent surplus due to its age.
  • Lisa
    • Gearing up for ACO Lunch Session on December 9th.
    • Have performed a first edit of newsletter articles.
    • Organizing ACO Secret Santa gift exchange.
  • Todd
    • Lab Supervisors will be working in lab until Dec 11th.
    • New hires for coming term to be determined. It may be possible to give some tutors and supervisors more hours and avoid hiring and training new staff.
    • ML 117 projectors have been running overnight following evening classes.  This may be related to a previous glitch where they would turn back on after being shut off. This issue has been reported in the last three weeks and is being monitored.
  • Colin
    • Checking into why the printer in HH 368 is dropping from one user’s PC desktop. Have to reinstall the printer daily as a workaround.