Committee meeting - October 18, 2018

Carol Lu
Secretary to the Committee­­­
October 18, 2018

Present: 

Steven Bourque (Chair), Andrew McAlorum, Trevor Bain, Keith McGowan, Paul Miskovsky, Marko Dumancic, Adam Savage, Jason Testart, David Gawley, Robyn Landers, Carol Lu (Secretary)

Guests:

Lisa Tomalty, Natasha Jennings

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Daryl Dore, Greg Smith, Omar Nafees, Erick Engelke, Dave Kibble

Agenda

  1. Overview of IST account rep role (Lisa Tomalty) [15 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meetings of Thursday September 20, 2018 [5 min.]
  4. Difference in resource service levels between current and retired staff (Trevor Bain) [10 min.]
  5. HP/Aruba Lifetime Warranty (Steven Bourque) [5 min.]
  6. IST Data Centre Colocation (Steven Bourque) [10 min.]
  7. Other Business [10 min.]
  8. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  9. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday November 1, 2018 at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]

Overview of IST account rep role (Lisa Tomalty)

Lisa Tomalty attended the meeting to provide an overview of the IST account rep role. Topics included:

  • What is the IST account rep role?
  • What do IST account reps do? 
  • Where do IST account reps work? 
  • Who are the IST account reps? 
  • Value of the role
  • How account reps can help with IT collaboration

View the full presentation on IST Account Rep Role and IT Collaboration (PDF)

Comments & Discussion

  • Question regarding Plant Ops involvement with the IST Account Reps
    • There is a lack of consistency with Plant Ops when using the RT system to track requests, they will use it for select requests but not work requests

Chair’s Remarks (Steven Bourque)

  • Reminder that ADFS authentication is available in the dev environment for testing
  • Promotion of ADFS is encouraged as new sites will not be allowed to use CAS authentication at some point in the future

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

  • The previous meetings minutes were accepted as distributed

Difference in resource service levels between current and retired staff (Trevor Bain)

  • It is not clear whether VPN access should be given to retirees
  • Different departments have different procedures

Comments & Discussion

  • Retirees are actively encouraged to contact service help desks rather than specific departments for assistance
  • University wide, retired staff should not be associated with their University of Waterloo email or WatIAM ID upon retiring
  • IST has historically provided support to retirees but this may change given the recent closing of the East Campus 2 service desk and retirement of the Service Desks Manager
  • Some departments have manually switched retirees over into different organizational units to grant them access to their accounts
  • The retiree active directory is dependent on information provided by Human Resources, this is not affected by departments switching retirees into different organizational units
  • Note that manual sponsorship of retired staff accounts can cause email forwarding to stop working

HP/Aruba Lifetime Warranty (Steven Bourque)

  • IST has inventory of HP switches and can provide if needed for server rooms
  • Only devices purchased from official re-sellers qualify for a warranty
  • In order to obtain a warranty, an original invoice and serial number must be provided
  • Note that devices purchased from vendors that are not official re-sellers will not qualify for a warranty

IST Data Centre Colocation (Steven Bourque)

  • There are requests from researchers to host physical servers in IST's data centre, IST will start taking on these requests
  • An email will be sent out to those making requests to define what will and will not be provided for this free service 

Comments & Discussion

  • Providing this service may give justification to having a shared faculty data centre

Other Business

Cases of N: drive mappings changing for full-time undergraduate students with part-time jobs (Marko)

  • N: drives connected to student account profiles are being permanently deleted
  • Issue will be reviewed and followed up with by Marko and Steven

​Update on VPN (Steven)

  • Currently running seamlessly in a test environment
  • 2-factor authentication is still a work in progress

Personal websites hosted by the University of Waterloo (Andrew)

  • Personal web space will no longer be offered for new sites but will continue to be offered for existing sites  
  • Faculty members have the option to transfer their sites to UW Scholar
    • Staff (active or retired) with existing sites cannot request this transfer

Roundtable Reporting

Arts (Keith McGowan)

  • TLS 1.1 has been removed, there have been a few reports of people not being able to receive email
    • Rogers billing is not getting delivered to inboxes
    • A soft fail undeliverable message appears for three days before disappearing

Comments & Discussion

  • Rogers issue was temporary and fixed on their side
     

AHS (Trevor Bain)

  • Currently running tests and statistics on NVivo, seems to be working well
  • Looking to standardize video conferencing hardware in meeting rooms to include
    • A Yamaha CS700 speaker bar mount which features four directional mics and a video camera
    • A Meeting Owl camera which features a 360 degree camera that displays whoever is currently speaking during a meeting, can split screen to multiple people as well

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Recovered from recent MC power outage
    • A few hard drives were lost
    • Request to get temporary generator power was not approved due to complexity and cost

IST (Andrew McAlorum)

  • Currently looking to obtain service expectations of IST from admin support groups in order to standardize processes

Library (Adam Savage)

  • Aaron Smallwood recently filled the position for Systems Administrator
     

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on November 1, 2018 at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.