ACO Meeting Minutes October 26, 2017

Minutes of the Arts Computing Department meeting held on October 26, 2017

Present: R. Park, K. McGowan, H. Balagtas, S. Spears, N. Bromley, J. Schildroth, W. Lewis, T. Marshall-Taylor

Co-ops: M. DiGiacomantonio, M. Oonwala, C. Persaud

Regrets: S. Hartung, B. Baer

Attendees:

  • Bill B.
    • Stratford-Still awaiting on increasing bandwidth for Digital Media Stratford (DMS)
    • NVivo-Concurrent licensing model is prohibitive, but looking for alternatives to bring down costs
    • ACO Professional Development meeting- Heard some great feedback about last Thursday’s session, keep up the good work
    • ACO Purchases- An RT ticket will be created for help streamline and collect all purchase requests (printers, supplies, etc.), name yet to be determined
    • UWSA Secondment-Starts this morning (at AGM) however interviews for ACO staff member commences Friday morning, there are two people being interviewed
  • Marco D.
    • Sessional progress - Two in English are being deployed, one is giving issues because not all software is running properly, and on the last sessional Bitlocker wasn’t working
    • Angela Christelis’s system is slow so tried running scans and device manager to see what the problem is
    • Speech communication coop’s system’s screen turns black periodically. Tried to reimage it but it still wasn’t fixed, then when Scott re-imaged it again it worked
    • Janice Aurini’s MacBook has non-functioning keyboard and trackpad. Set her up with a spare and still have to determine what’s the problem with it
    • Updated Taxprep document for opening files for AFM 202. Sent document to Cynthia to reformat and add to the ACO website
    • Updating missing userIDs in CALMS
    • Finished writing the first drafts for 2 of 3 newsletters
  • Mahammed O.
    • Finishing up first two Newsletter articles after receiving great feedback from Cynthia
    • New Faculty Rollover for Andrea Quinlan
    • John Coutu from fine art’s rollover needs to be rescheduled-fine arts due to other issues happening on her computer
    • Karin Staley’s Rollover is tomorrow
    • Four English Sessional Machines to be deployed today
    • Re-imaged Laptop for Kevin Harrigan
    • The return of Taxprep questions
  • Cynthia P.
    • I’ve completed writing and editing all three of my Newsletters on the
    • Completed writing all three Newsletter articles on How safe is your Nexus drive, Everything you need to know about solid state drives, and the Professor spotlight on Beth Coleman
    • Currently editing Marco’s and Mahammad’s Newsletters
    • Attending Student Leadership Program: Presentation skills
    • Working on making the OFAS homepage accessible and will be sending the document with all changes to Herbert
    • Will be attending an IT Seminar on Qualtrics and creating a report for it
  • Keith M.
    • ACO copier will be delivered on October 31
    • Bulk email account for St Paul’s
    • Update on transition
    • Request to Psychology for the use of their grad labs for Psychology study. This is because there have been many calls to book PAS 1237 for research studies. However, for small groups, the lab is being closed and many computers aren’t being used
    • New certification for artsadmin
    • Incident response issue
    • Discussion item: the 519-888-4542 external ACO phone number
    • Discussion item: Switching to IntranetSSL certificates on Nexus DCs
    • Changing ACO meeting with three categories:
      • Mention: item description in agenda is enough to give the information.
      • Discussion item: are items which you might need clarification about
      • Additional information: are items that can’t be described fully in in the Agenda
    • Lisa will be taking a look at resolving the fact that IST can’t see RT tickets
    • Sherry mentioned that she’s been receiving many calls from 84542 line about technical issues. Need to have discussion on what to do with that number
    • Main controllers in Nexus are changing to intranet certificates. For external laptops, this may be an issue. Hope to keep track of any computers that are giving issues
  • Herbert B.
    • CALMS-working on importing Psychology database
    • Working on retrieving software information form webstore, Will has provided a test URL
    • WatTis- taking over Keith’s place in the programming committee and registration opens on Wednesday November 1st
  • Sean S.
    • Updated Flash, Chrome, and Dropbox for Macs
    • Wrote a program for jmulvey to process a course scheduling excel file into a nice html table that she uses to spot potential conflicts. Now working
    • If someone can’t change brightness on Dell monitor hold down menu button for 15 seconds and it will unlock it
    • Researching Linux container technology (lxc/lxd) and Docker for potential use in ACO for sites/programs we host
  • Nevil B.
    • Learnlock and Psychology study in PAS 1237
    • SCOM reports on security group changes.
    • Fax cover page issues
    • Recreating scripts for HH280 for exams
    • NVIVO security group currently populated by Soc700s and Poly Sci 600s security groups, needs to automated for sociology graduate students. It would be nice if it were automated better to grad students rather than rely on course numbers because they need to be added manually to a security group
  • Scott P.
    • NVivo licensing
    • September Windows 10 image issues:
      • Believe to be related with SCM client
      • Since being applied, every instance of re-imaged or image of a new image, the downloading stays at 0 percent and it just sits there
      • When the link is disabled it appears to work fine
    • Co-op mid-term reviews Friday
    • SCCM Client issues
    • People in IST want to install Skype (consumer) and gave them Arts Mercury
  • Jameson S.
    • Testing new Learnlock version
    • Working through issues with packaging Veracrypt with the help of Mike Cocker. Hoping to test thoroughly before giving to Psychology to test
    • Discussion around whether we should be getting software vetted before packaged and deployed to make sure it won’t have any negative effects on network or computer i.e. VeraCrypt which isn’t officially supported by the University of Waterloo. How much do we support it?
  • Will L.
    • Wireless management configuration depends on how Eduroam is configured on the client site (user, machine, user/machine). May explain some of the unexpected behavior that’s been seen. Writing up documentation:
      • Stuff isn’t working the way it was described to work and trying to figure out how to get it to work
      • If Eduroam works on the University of Waterloo’s campus if you log on at Laurier it doesn’t work
      • When machine is connected to Eduroam from login screen, it uses machine authentication
      • Working to get it fixed and have documentation on how some of it works
      • Eduroam configuration tool works well and recommend that all laptops have it.
      • Use of machine authentication does have some advantages: It makes computer management possible, and makes Nexus better because you can connect wirelessly the first time
    • Testing a new report in the Webstore support interface that shows all licenses in a given support area (requested by Psychology)
    • API interface into webstore to give report on what software is assigned to a particular machine
  • Todd M.
    • There is a work order for the carpet in ML 113 due to seam separation. It will be fixed in the future but it has been taped down.
    • Access items ML 117
    • Help from Kimberly Van-SPCOM Co-op
    • Spanish Lab Changes for Winter term