Committee meeting - April 5, 2018

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee­­­
April 16, 2018

Present: 

Andrew McAlorum (Acting Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Robyn Landers, Keith McGowan, Paul Miskovsky, Adam Savage, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Trevor Bain, Daryl Dore, Marko Dumancic, Dave Kibble, Omar Nafees

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meetings of March 22, 2018 [5 min.]
  3. Explicitly blocking email from external organizations offering access to course materials (Jason Testart) [15 min.]
  4. Virtual box usage [15 min.]
  5. Other Business [10 min.]

  6. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]

  7. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, April 19, 2018, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]

Chair’s Remarks (Andrew McAlorum)

  • Andrew McAlorum will be chairing the committee while Steven Bourque is away on paternal leave.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The previous meetings minutes were accepted as distributed.

Explicitly blocking email from external organizations (Jason Testart)

Jason Testart discussed the guidelines laid out by the Secretariat regarding external organizations contacting students for course materials.

  • Legal and Immigration Services are looking into drafting a cease and desist type letter referencing the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).
    • They have also asked Jason to blacklist the organizations attempting to solicit course material from students.
  • Jason has suggested to Bruce Campbell and Mario Coniglio to raise these concerns at UCIST.
  • Jason Testart also distributed a newsletter from Legal and Immigration Services that covers the topic in greater detail.

Virtual box usage

  • We were contacted by Oracle regarding our use of Virtual Box (and the Virtual Box extension pack).
    • If you are using Virtual Box as a dev environment for yourself to test things out then you are working within the license agreement.
    • Allowing others to remote in and use your Virtual Box would be a breach of the agreement (does not appear that anyone here is doing that).

Other Business

IST’s support of mailman

  • Submitted an RT a year ago regarding upgrades to mailman and these upgrades have still not happened.
    • Some have suggested that we use Mailchimp instead of mailman; both of those tools have two very different use cases.
    • Mailman will not be going anytime soon and Andrew McAlorum will be following up to understand the confusion regarding this.

Roundtable Reporting

Library (Adam Savage)

  • We have migrated 60 staff over to VDI (this was our first experience with Windows 10 in VDI).

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Air conditioning stopped working in the M3 building; Plant Ops came to check it out and determined that an electrician was working on wiring in a nearby room and turned off the breaker that powers the AC.
    • There is a failsafe on the AC that forces it to turn off in this type of situation, so now Plant Ops will change it to fail ON instead of OFF going forward.
    • Will also be discussing with Plant Ops regarding their response time (an hour) to an important issue.
      • Glen Weppler may be able to provide some insight into getting better response times from Plant Ops.

IT Security (Jason Testart)  

  • Multi-factor authentication (Duo) being turned on next week in opt-in mode.
    • The Outlook Web Application has it in place but it is invisible to everyone.
    • Will send out a limited communication next week to IT people; will be soft launched initially.  
  • WatIAM upgrade is still happening next week.

Client Services, IST (Andrew McAlorum)

  • We are looking into adding to the initial orientation package for students with information on phishing/other email security information.
    • Will talk with Jason Testart regarding this.
  • Campus wayfinding project being led by Denis Huber, Sandra Banks and Plant Ops will look at directional signage around campus.
    • This project will impact everyone; they sent out a survey recently regarding this so if you are interested, please reach out to the project team.
    • Indoor wayfinding is not in scope for this project.
  • The winter edition of the IST Newsletter is out; be sure to check it out.
  • The IST Service Desk in the Davis Centre has been completely renovated; much nicer space.
  • Office 365 advancement project is moving along; there will be pop up booths to focus on helping staff activate their accounts.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Busy with the usual end of term stuff.
  • A faculty member wanted to buy laptops to run Ubuntu but instead we used Virtual Box to make it available which prevented a fair amount of unnecessary spending.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on April 19, 2018 at 1:30pm, in EC2 1021.