Committee meeting - May 14, 2020 | Computing Technology and Services Committee

Carol Lu 
Secretary to the Committee 
May 14, 2020 
 
Present: Steven Bourque, Bill Baer, Paul Miskovsky, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Robyn Landers, Dave Kibble, Andrew McAlorum, Adam Savage, Lori Paniak, Andrea Chappell, Jason Testart, Pratik Patel
 
Regrets: Trevor Bain, Daryl Dore, Greg Smith
 
Agenda 

Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
Approval of the minutes of the meetings of Thursday April 16, 2020 [5 min.]
Alibaba access from China (Steve Bourque) [5 min.]
Changes to Campus Telephony and pricing (Andrew McAlorum) [15 min.]
Faculty rep for O365 Operations group (Andrew McAlorum) [5 min.]
Git service update (Robyn Landers) [5 min.]
Discussion: thoughts on campus IT priorities/recommendations during the pandemic (Dave Kibble) [10 min.]
Updated Project/apps list (Dave Kibble) [5 min.]
Other Business [10 min.]
Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
Next CTSC Meeting
[Will be held Thursday May 28 at 1:30 p.m.]

Chair's Remarks (Steve Bourque)

An update from Microsoft on RDP access for student labs was discussed. More details to be shared at a later date.

Comments and discussion

Are students who are using VDI able to use remote desktop?
- Virtual Machines can be discussed at a future meeting
For the library, who is the contact for Microsoft licenses?
- Contact is Dave Hinton

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

Added additional points regarding the 'Standardizing link distribution guidelines in emails' discussion
- CTSC to make recommendations and pass along to UCIST
- Jason to investigate if there is any existing documentation to use as reference

Alibaba access from China (Steve Bourque)

Email announcing the new Alibaba VPN was sent last night, students have started using it
VPN connects in China, goes to a VM in Alibaba's cloud, goes into the U.S., gets proxied out of Virginia, and into a public IP (non-UW)
Operating at 50 megabits
Going well and working as expected, changes will be made if necessary

Comments and discussion

How many students does this involve
- The estimate is 500-1000
  - Just under 500 students have registered in DUO 2FA with a Chinese phone number
  - Earlier survey confirms there are atleast 515 students studying in China
- Would be useful to have a breakdown of students per faculty using this VPN
  - We know how many Chinese students there are per faculty but not how many are currently in China this term
  - Math has half of the registered Chinese nationals at the University
    - Engineering has the second largest number
This product is something Alibaba sells off the shelf
- Includes 2 VM's
- IST has snapshots of the VM to redeploy if necessary
Is there a more restrictive whitelist than just uwaterloo.ca?
- Computer Science has interative endpoints and would like to restrict the tunnel to more specific endpoints
- No SSH is going through; goes through the IP in China, not the IP in the U.S.

Changes to Campus Telephony and pricing (Andrew McAlorum)

Follow-up to previous email discussions: are there any other thoughts or concerns?
IST is proposing a primarily soft phone model by May 2021, will no longer bill for phones

Comments and discussion

At the Library the entire department is using Skype for Business phones
- This has made the WFH transition easier
- 40% of staff have handsets; 60% of staff have a headset
- Performance wise, Teams have been better for WFH than Skype for Business
Arts is looking to reduce telephone services charges in the department
- Transition to soft phones would be good for cost savings
  - Transition to soft phones can be done before the proposal is official; cost savings will not apply until proposal has been finalized
- Arts supports the proposal
Environment supports the proposal
- Migration to soft phones does not fit into the timeline of moving from Skype for Business to Teams
  - Skype for Business will be around until 2025; the move will be from physical phones to Skype for Business first before switching to Teams
  - The jump to an A5 license would cost more
Math has not provided any feedback yet

Faculty rep for O365 Operations group (Andrew McAlorum)

Trevor Bain will be the faculty rep on the O365 Operations group
Due to a high volume of meeting agenda items, the O365 committee will be split into two committees:
- Operations committee
- Steering committee

Git service update (Robyn Landers)

It appears a Git update has not been made in a while; there are some regular and security updates that need to be made
- Steve to follow up with Daryl Dore

Discussion: thoughts on campus IT priorities/recommendations during the pandemic (Dave Kibble)

A lot of good input was provided during the campus IT review
CTSC provided a lot of good recommendations regarding sustainability, long term planning, combining data centres, Wi-Fi, etc.
Are there any changes to previous recommendations given the current pandemic situation?

Comments and discussion

Haven't had to use phones since WFH started
In regards to e-classrooms, there has been interest in lecture capture and streaming
- Currently being done ad-hoc as requests come in
- Infrastructure might be needed in order to scale up e-classrooms in the Fall
  - Might need a hybrid approach
In regards to virtual infrastructure with application delivery, we may need VM ware in order to deliver products (workspace delivering applications instead of remote desktop)
Focus should be on bringing the online learning experience to the forefront
ITMS videographers are permitted on campus to help instructors with lecture capture
Application access should be at the forefront
- VPN and remote desktop have been behind a lot of troubleshooting issues as people are trying to access applications
- A website where people can download applications should be developed instead of having to use VPN and remote desktop for access
Physical spaces need to be reassessed; we need to determine the best way to provide services (eg. should students be responsible for their Creative Cloud licenses?)
With the constant switching of software vendors, users may have difficulty adapting to new applications

Updated Project/apps list (Dave Kibble)

CTSC members previously provided a list of projects and applications used in the faculties
- Dave to resend the list to the group for updates

Other Business

No other business.

Roundtable

Instructional Technologies and Media Services, IST (Andrea)

The University's privacy policy will be updated to include content about recording online and live events
- Policy updates will be added to the Keep Learning site
ITMS has received many requests for Teams and Stream use
- Andrea will send CTSC members an email about Teams/Stream limitations; this content will also be added to the Keep Learning site
Working with IAP to conduct a survey for instructors and students one month into the term to find out what has been working well and what hasn't
- Will work with the faculties to determine whether any faculty-specific questions need to be included in the survey
Student IT-related content for teaching and learning has been added to the Student IT Services site

Client Services, IST (Andrew)

Email has been sent out announcing Jira Service Desk being piloted by the IST Service Desk
- Currently being tested with the helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca email address
- Requests sent to helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca were previously sent to a shared mailbox; the requests are now sent to Jira Service Desk
- Jira Service Desk is being piloted as a potential replacement tool for RT
  - Jira is already being used as the University's IT project management tool; Confluence is also being used as a wiki

Arts (Bill)

Trying to transition people from N: Drive to OneDrive
- Asking users to only transfer important files rather than all files
- Any recommendations on how long N: Drive files should be retained for?

Comments and discussion

IST does not currently have a date set for when N: Drives will be discontinued
Joe Allen is working on the N: Drive migration project
N: Drives can't be disabled right away because of the network configuration
A one year retention period for Teams chats may be too short
There are ~60k student N: Drives and ~20k staff N: Drives
The migration should start with PC machines first; Macs may be more difficult due to transfer issues from special characters in file names

Environment (Don)

Any updates on when staff will be moving to email in the cloud?

Comments and discussion

IST is still working through post-student migration clean up; staff will be moved once complete

Engineering (Erick)

Shared Englab lab usage stats
Currently running at 10% capacity, seems to be a popular service

Computer Science (Lori)

There were not as many communications surrounding the student email migration as expected

Comments and discussion

What are the 'clean up' items as a result of the migration?
- Making sure licensing counts are accurate for O365 and ensuring the exceptions are working as expected
Email calendar on Exchange on prem will have difficulty sharing with O365 calendar users
A long-term faculty member did not have a Connect account and had forwarding issues after being migrated to O365
- User might have been reclassified as a new employee during the migration

Science (Paul)

Ran testing and conducted a demo of Sassafras on Englab
- Englab meets the requirements of the Science department, Erick has provided great service
- Englab is being advertised on Science's website
Continuing to help with defenses and conferences
- Feedback has been positive so far
- Minor WebEx issues on occasion
New version of evaluate will be launching soon
- Upgraded to Python 3, no visible changes

Comments and discussion

What procedures are other departments using to allow people to go on campus?
- Essential teams require a memo
- Visiting faculty and staff can go into the parking lot, contact staff via text, and pick up their items in the parking lot
- If faculty/staff are not essential, the Safety Office, Executive Officer, and supervisor must be notified
- All campus fobs have been disabled unless they are for essential use
- For those permitted on campus, a walkthrough might be a good idea
  - An essential lab employee discovered a water leak in the building while on campus
  - CSCF does weekly walkthroughs of labs

Math (Robyn)

Leak protection flooring has been installed in the server room
Looking for someone interested in conducting a demo for CVE security (cross references softwares and needed security patches)