Committee meeting - May 20, 2021

Carol Lu   
Secretary to the Committee   
May 20, 2021
   
Present: Adam Savage, Andrea Chappell, Andrew McAlorum, Bill Baer,Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Greg Parks, Jason Testart, Paul Miskovsky, Robyn Landers, Steven Bourque, Lawrence Folland, Trevor Bain, Pratik Patel

Regrets: Daryl Dore, Greg Smith
 
Agenda   

  1. Chair’s remarks (Steven Bourque) [5 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes from Thursday May 6, 2021 [5 min.]
  3. Zoom - migration to the new license (Andrea Chappell) [10 min.]
  4. Mailing list discussion (Erick Engelke) [5 min.]
  5. Reducing email servers and how that fits with IST plans (Erick Engelke) [5 min.]
  6. Security Device RFP takeaways (Erick Engelke) [5 min.]
  7. Other business and roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  8. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday June 3 at 1:30 p.m.]

Chair's remarks

  • No remarks.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting 

  • The previous meeting’s minutes were accepted as distributed.   
     

Zoom - migration to the new license (Andrea Chappell)

  • The objective is to move all existing UW Zoom users to the campus license, enable Zoom to use ADFS authentication, and to configure instituition-wide settings (e.g. user roles and permissions, enable breakout rooms)
  • There are approximately 10,000 existing users with an @uwaterloo.ca email address associated with their Zoom account
    • This is a mix of both Free and Pro accounts; the focus will be to move the Pro accounts to the campus license first
    • ~30 users with upcoming license expirations have been moved over
    • There is also a mix of userid@uwaterloo.ca and friendly email addresses
      • Users using friendly email addresses will need to update their account email to userid@uwaterloo.ca 
  • Still investigating whether Zoom authentication and UW authentication can both be enabled 
    • Arts and Renison both currently UW authentication for their licenses
  • All UW users will be pre-populated in Zoom, similar to how users were added in Webex
  • A roadmap of this work from Zoom has been requested; there is no date set yet on when this work will be completed
  • Contact Andrea Chappell for resources for communicating the details/timeline of this work to users

Comments and discussion

  • An email update to let campus IT staff know what's coming would be good to send 
  • A separate message to the Pro account users will be sent in advance to any changes being made
  • Zoom has offered training sessions for IT staff 
    • Users find it easy to join Zoom meetings but setting up meetings can be confusing for the meeting organizer
  • Webex is free until the Cisco deal expires in ~2.5 years

Mailing list and reducing email servers discussion (Erick Engelke)

  • Engineering currently has many email servers
    • Many are used for mailing lists
  • What are other groups using email servers for? 
  • Is there an RFP for mailing lists? 

Comments and discussion

  • The Mass Email Management Project is currently stalled; IST is in the process of hiring a new project manager before continuing
    • RFP was originally scheduled to start at the beginning of summer but will likely be delayed
    • This project is focused on internal and student communications (e.g. UR emails to employees, Daily Bulletin)
      • The tool will have a mailing lists feature but will function closer to Mailchimp rather than Mailman
      • The tool is intended for unidirectional mailing, not back-and-forth email correspondence
  • There is an ongoing email routing project that encompasses recommendations made by CTSC
    • Mx record was moved to the cloud last week
    • Next part of the project is to migrate remaining alumni and retiree mailboxes to Office 365
    • Based on CTSC's recommendation to limit the number of campus mail servers, CTSC members can start to review the list of mail servers for their group and identify whether any can be centralized or disabled
  • Engineering is working with Mike Patterson to get a list of mail servers
  • Computer Science has notified users that the CS mail server is going away
  • Faculties are looking for the ability to create dynamic mailing lists based on classlists
    • Steve to follow up with IST's email admin to see if distribution lists can be set up now
      • May be possible since a lot of classes are already using roster-synced Teams
      • Note: distribution lists only work for UW users; external users cannot be added

Security Device RFP takeaways (Erick Engelke)

  • Jason Testart sent an update via email regarding the Security Device RFP prior to the meeting; no further questions

Other Business/Roundtable 

Information Security Services, Jason

  • An announcement was sent yesterday advising users with compromised passwords to change their password
  • ~ 900 users acted on this request within 24 hours
  • Stale accounts are also being identified during this process; ISS may approach departments about these stale accounts to follow up on whether they can be disabled or deleted

Health, Trevor

  • Sent out a notice to faculty with instructions on how to connect to VPN before logging into their managed machine
    • Users that recently changed their password were not able to log in without connecting to VPN first due to cached credentials

Engineering, Erick

  • The compromised passwords message was well written with a good response rate
  • VPN has been disabled for a number of Windows machines to allow users to access remote desktop without having to connect easily by accepting a 2FA prompt rather than connecting to the VPN

Math, Robyn

  • Having difficulty tracking down rogue access points
  • Used heat maps provided by IST Network Services, but there are still outstanding rogues; heat maps are only able to provide an approximate location
  • Disabling the wi-fi in buildings during the wi-fi upgrade project might provide a good opportunity for locating the rogues
  • Cisco heat maps may provide more specific information than Aruba heat maps
  • Many user devices (e.g. printers, mac minis) have Wi-Fi automatically enabled, which poisons the Wi-Fi environment and slows down the network
  • Engineering uses a laptop on a cart that has scanning software; this has been successful in finding rogues

Computer Science, Lawrence

  • Any update on the ISO-8601 proposal?
    • The proposal was sent to UCIST; no negative feedback received

WUSA, Pratik

  • SLC is scheduled to re-open this September

Environment, Don

  • Currently investigating Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) as a potential option for future courses
  • ArcGIS seems to work well on WVD
  • If you're interested in exploring WVD, submit an RT