ACO Meeting Minutes October 25, 2018

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

Present:  S. Hartung, R. Park, K. McGowan, H. Balagtas, S. Speers, N. Bromley, S. Paterson, J. Schildroth, W. Lewis

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

Regrets:  B. Baer (on secondment), G. Parks, T. Marshall-Taylor, M. Byerley, C. Wallace, T. Pao

Attendees:

  • Sherry
    • Set up 882 Fall 2018 online course evaluations, which includes 77 CEL online courses. To date, I have received requests for 31 paper evaluations. Deadline to request paper is end of day November 1st.
    • Lots of catch up since being away.
  • Keith
    • Updated SSL cert for ahslab.
    • Asked Engineering for a new copy of LearnLock.
    • Microsoft Teams site created for Arts. This is a cloud based SharePoint, Skype for Business and chat system. ACO co-ops still to be added yet. Should set up with uwaterloo.ca address and it will add as an external user. Training will be provided, possibly in next professional development.
    • CTSC Meeting
      • ADFS will be replacing CAS.
      • IST is offering a COLO for servers in the faculties. This will have air conditioning, and 208 volt power supplies. Could be an option to move our servers.
      • Email continuance for retired staff will only be by request, to prevent staff from working after retirement. Faculty members’ email will continue upon their retirement.
      • The web site service personal.uwaterloo.ca will no longer be available to new users. Current sites will not be removed.
      • Some issues (e.g. lost profiles) with N Drive mapping have been seen with users moving to different areas. The N Drive is still there but not accessible. An automated script to create N Drives will be run in the morning. If that time is missed, availability will need to wait until next daily run.
    • Email Working Group
      • Approximately 7,500 mailboxes have been moved to Connect, but 70,000 remain. These are mostly Alumni, and active Alumnis will be moved to edu (after Christmas). Emails will not be lost in the process, but the user will need to connect to a different server.
      • ACL rule for port 25 SMTP. The plan is to block port 25 outbound on the firewall(s) for all IP addresses with the exception of those that have used that port in the past xx days.
      • No ETA yet on stopping email forwarding for staff and faculty.
  • Bob
    • There is a new committee working on a set of common questions to be used for course evaluations campus wide.  The goal is to have one set of questions across campus so faculties are answering the same questions. Each faculty would be able to add further questions applicable to their faculty. David DeVidi is chairing the committee. The intention is to run a pilot parallel to current questions in the 2019 Fall term.
  • Oliver
    • When mapping N: drives to mac OS systems, the folder that is remembered in Finder is the root for all users (smb://artsfileu.uwaterloo.ca) and not the appropriate users folder. That must be manually added at each new connection. Creating a short cut is the solution.
  • Samuel
    • Calculator application not on Nexus PCs. The .exe that is on the PCs does not work. This may be a version issue as the 17.09 version doesn’t seem to be an issue.
    • Joel Blit's MacBook rollover is slow on his home internet connection. This is likely due to his home internet provided. It is suggested that he do a speed test or wireless diagnostic on Mac to provide data to determine the cause. It may be that his computer ghz is competing with phone ghz.
  • Angelica
    • Started designing the layout for Herbert’s December Poster Presentation at WatITis 2018.
    • Going through my Scinage preparing a Tutorial Video list for future ACO co-ops.
  • Herbert
    • CALMS
      • Scheduled feedback email will be sent out to client one week after deployment to see if everything is working okay. Email comes from Primary Support Person automatically.
      • AD/DNS cleanup for previous rollover asset pushed to production. Asset clean up to be done when someone leaves a department. An email is sent when a user moves from one department to another, to reassign assets to new user or retrieve assists if leaving the University and no one else to use them.
      • Bug cleanup when RT is missing.
    • Linux is required for Econ grad student. Scott pushed out Windows 10, and I’ve assisted in installing purchased software.
    • Preparing poster session for WatITis 2018 to show services ACO provides and contact information. If there is a service you’d like to feature, please let Herbert know.
  • Sean
    • Updated Skype for Business, Chrome, Firefox, Flash, Office 2016, Dropbox and Firefox for Macs.
    • Nxsartstest is a windows server on a 2012 machine which has not been used for some time. It was a print server set up for system administration but is no longer used so it can be turned off and deleted.
    • Upgraded ppocir from version 14.04 to 16.04.
    • We have 12 more servers running 14.04 that will need to be updated before April 2019. Working on upgrade processes.
    • Working on plan to upgrade our Bacula server from version 16.04 to 18.04 so that it can support 18.04.
    • Noticed disk failure on esxi-9. Installed openmanage on system to get diagnositic and had IST send replacement disk under warranty. I vacated the VM's on the machine until RAID was rebuilt with new disk.  All good.
  • Nevil
    • Created a PowerShell script to take Registrars Office .csv file of classes and create .ics files for ECH 1205, HH 280, ML 109, ML 113, ML 117, PAS 1237 to populate lab bookings. Can make exclusions/modifications for reading week/days. Does not book for statutory holidays. Gave to Todd and he was successful in booking his three labs. Sherry has also successfully tested for PAS 1237. Will look into giving it to Bonnie Bishop for booking of HH 280.
    • Cleaned up some old Windows 7 machines and assigned department values in AD to help migrate to Windows 10.
    • Investigated issues for Jeremie Fortin with Eikon, Taxprep and LearnLock.
    • Looking at ubuntu on Windows 10 install issues Herbert is experiencing.
    • A newer version of LearnLock has been requested from Engineering as it not working and not disabling Edge. Need to test when upgraded. Artsadmin testing can be done with Nevil’s office machine.
  • Scott
    • Received new Asus Chromebox for Dean of Arts Display. Old Nuc and older Chromebox locking up. It is in kiosk mode. Mirko is looking into how to get it to run.
    • Working on upgrading Windows 7 systems in Arts, Renison, and St. Paul's. There are 160 machines in Renison, 150 or so in Arts that need to be updated before January 2020.
    • FACCUS meeting was held on Tuesday, October 23rd.
  • Jameson
    • Applied BIOS updates to PAS 1237, HH 280 and ML 113.
    • Showed HH 280 Lab Manager how to lock down the lab with LearnLock. Jeremie Fortin was not set up but that has been fixed.
    • Renamed computer in History for Susan King from dmhayes-sr15 to s2king-sr15 and upgraded to Windows 10.
    • Imaged Anne Leaske's computer (Histugrad-sr15) to Windows 10 as Anne is going on secondment for seven months and they will be hiring a temp during that time.
    • Set up and tested GPO to block Microsoft Edge as LearnLock doesn't seem to do it anymore.
    • BIOS updates ongoing.
  • Greg
    • Finishing off infrastructure review.
    • Met with Psychology about moving to ArtsPrint. They have started testing.
    • Thanks to everyone for making this a great year in Arts.
    • If you have any Central Services questions feel free to IM/e-mail me.
  • Will
    • The dates previously sent out for two-factor authentication (2FA) implementation no longer apply, and there is no set timeline for next steps. The web page has been updated based on feedback and includes more help information.
    • DeliverPoint is now available to audit SharePoint permissions. Cannot run a report on an entire faculty or it will bring down the system. Site admins have access to check permissions, so could be checked in each department.
    • Work is underway to deploy Microsoft Teams desktop client. Web version and mobile clients are also available.
    • The personal web site service personal.uwaterloo.ca is not adding any new sites, and starting to shut down unused sites.
    • New VPN goes live November 6th.