Committee meeting - November 3, 2022

Sarah McKone  
Secretary to the Committee     
November 3, 2022 
    
Present:  Steven Bourque (chair), Andrew McAlorum, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Greg Parks, Jason Testart, Lori Paniak, Nick Springate, Paul Miskovsky, Pratik Patel, Robyn Landers, Trevor Bain 

 
Regrets: Adam Savage, Bill Baer, Pam Fluttert 

 
Agenda   

  1. Presentation: IT Review: Research Computing theme (Andrew McAlorum[20 min.] 
  2. Chair’s Remarks 
  3. Approval of the minutes from Thursday, October 20, 2022 [5 min.] 
  4. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.] 
  5. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday, November 17 at 1:30 p.m.] 

Presentation: IT Review: Research Computing theme (Andrew McAlorum) 

  • Looking for an enterprise solution for public cloud usage instead of researchers having to purchase this. Currently some post-doctoral students buy their own Azure credits to do research computing. 
  • Faculty and research utilize outdated information, particularly because Atlassian does not appear in web searches.  
  • How do we support members of the research community from a risk perspective when we tend to be risk averse?  
  • There needs to be expertise in research support, particularly in consideration to cloud environments.  
  • It could create confusion for researchers if IST supports some things but not others. Perhaps outside of provisions IST should not be involved. 
  • Hardware exists on campus, and we could do a better job identifying the research hardware and assisting researchers in gaining access to the hardware. 
  • There is a concern for research data management, particularly for those working with big data. It would be beneficial to have a central repository, to comply with sponsor requirements. 
  • It is recommended that this presentation be given at UCIST as well. 

Chair's remarks 

  • None. 

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting  

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

Other Business/Roundtable 

IST, Andrew McAlorum 

  • N Drive end-of-life:  
    • Plan for April with the ability to pull an emergency valve if needed.  
    • If there is any other software that writes to N Drive, please inform Andrew. 
    • Tim Farrell ran a report of all student N Drives and will share this. Actual usage is quite minimal so this should not be controversial.  
    • The communication for this is focused on Academic Support Units but there is a point about working out student use cases 
      • It should be clear that this does not apply to all faculty, the communication should list who this will not apply to (math and engineering). 
  • Student Atlassian licensing: ~250/280 of the identified students with licenses have never logged in so these will be removed. Moving forward new student groups will require an employee sponsor and a maximum expiry date of one year. Once there is a formal plan in place communications will be shared.  
    • SailPoint is designed to give licenses for a set t period. Atlassian support can reach out to Sean Mason and explore this within SailPoint.

Engineering, Erick Engelke 

  • Contacted by security as a user was using 4 terabytes of data a day, do we have any metrics we use to help guide decisions on what is reasonable?  
    • Network links are monitored but Steven is not aware of any concerns or recommendations. Mostly concerned with speed, and impact to other traffic. Steven to ask networks for recommendations, 
    • There is no concern unless it is indicative of a security risk or it’s impacting others' use of the network. Security is not trying to limit the ability to do things like move big data, simply ensures the activity is legitimate. 
    • The Campus has two internet providers, and we try to run at 50% capacity to handle a complete failure if necessary, so there is room to manage short bursts 
    • Doesn’t follow the baseline and should be investigated, but not meant to judge 
  • 10G link to Cambridge, is there an update on this?
    • There have been some hardware issues with the location fiber was installed that has now been resolved. Appears that this will be completed at the end of this year. Currently, Cambridge is running at 1 GB. 
  • Are we continuing with Sailpoint as the identity management system or is there an RFP to look at alternatives?  
    • No current plans to move away from Sailpoint. There are interesting solutions from the US. There would be a concern if Sailpoint were to go to the cloud, at which point alternative solutions would need to be explored. There are plans to implement changes to Duo to improve resiliency to ‘prompt bomb’ attacks. 
  • Can Engineering receive a copy of the external email records for new WatIAM accounts? 
    • Jason can follow up, there is a flow on how this information is extracted from Workday. 

Computer Science, Lori Paniak 

  • Looking for an update on wi-fi issues 
    • Steven is waiting for the technical information on the resolution, but the authentication issue is resolved. 
    • Guest creation issue is still being investigated by Cisco.  
      • The knowledge base article can be updated to indicate there is a known issue and do this instead. Options include, SSID, approving the mac address, and guest WatIAM accounts.  
      • If possible, the Captive Portal SSID should be turned off.  
    • It is unknown if the android issue is ongoing. 

Math, Robyn Landers 

  • Wondering if anyone is aware of a functioning way to do OneDrive and Linux? 
    • Paul believes there is an open-source option and will find the repo and share this.