Committee Meeting - October 29, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
November 9, 2015

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Steven Bourque, Andrea Chappell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Dave Gawley, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart Dave Gawley

Regrets:

Dave Kibble, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Scinage demonstration (Mirko Vucicevich)
  2. Chair’s remarks [10 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of October 15, 2015 [5 min.]
  4. ID Cards update [10 min.]
  5. Portable air conditioners for machine rooms discussion [15 min.]
  6. Open software licensing discussion [15 min.]
  7. Other Business [10 min.]
  8. Roundtable discussion – all [30 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, November 12, 2015, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Scinage demonstration

Mirko Vucicevich demonstrated a program he is developing called Scinage.

  • Will be used in Science in the Fall as an alternative to Visibull
  • The technology has improved greatly over the last few years which has made this a more feasible option.
  • The demoed product was created in 2 weeks; still lots of work to do on it but coming along quickly.
  • Want it to be able to run itself so we do not have to monitor it for everyone.
  • It could be integrated with emergency services to display notifications in case of an emergency.
  • It is available on git.uwaterloo.ca; search “Scinage”
  • We could likely have user groups ready for January.

Chair’s Remarks (Bruce Campbell)

No remarks

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on October 15, 2015, were accepted as distributed.

ID cards update

  • Melissa Conrad and her admin group will be working on this project.
  • Have had initial discussions with the WatCard Office and they are open to work on this; we would provide the cards with a proximity and mag stripe on it.
  • Expiration was discussed; decided to build it into the decommission process instead.
  • The WatCard Office has offered to come to EC2 to set up and take pictures of all staff in IST.
  • Once there is some documentation highlighting progress and next steps, it will be brought back to this committee.

Portable air conditioners (Robyn Landers)

  • Math had a situation where one of their server room air conditioners failed while the other air conditioner was being serviced.
    • This is a rare situation, but Plant Ops suggested getting portable air conditioners as backups for these situations.
  • Landers was wondering if this was something others had heard of, or have any experience with.
    • Members agreed that small portable air conditioners would not be sufficient in this situation.
    • Should this not be something Plant Ops provides in cases of emergencies as part of their service package?

Open Software Licensing discussion

  • With the amount of local development happening on campus, Science is asking if we should begin considering having a UW site license for our open source code.
  • Note that software developed by staff as part of their job is owned by the University.
  • Will explore this further offline.

Other Business

  • Have others been experiencing problems with the lab lockdown tool?
    • Engineering uses a client that locks down the lab for exams; needed to enable certain sites and it registers all of the sites it visits. If others are interested in this client, please contact Erick Engelke.
  • Marko Dumancic has booked a room in ENV2 that can be used for CTSC meetings if everyone is interested in switching to that room.
    • Dumancic will give Darren Bondy a tour to see if it would be suitable to host CTSC meetings and may consider trying the room for a meeting.
  • The 3rd manager in CSCF has been announced now; Omar Nafees is now the manager of Teaching and Operations.

Roundtable Reporting

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Looking to migrate personal pages soon (once IST is ready to do personal pages) or shutting down the sites that are not needed anymore.
    • Hopefully we are able to do this in the New Year.
  • Working to incorporate our feedback page into RT; hoping to make some progress on this in the next couple of weeks.
  • Human Resources has approved the unification of positions that I have proposed. We now have career paths similar to IST. 
  • Recently had a student change their name and we needed to change it in multiple systems; it was a challenge trying to change it in LEARN.
    • Andrea Chappell will investigate this issue and report back on how to improve it.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • When will personal pages be available?
    • Bob Hicks will look into timeline and report back.
  • Last meeting, remarks were made about inappropriate changes to our migrated web pages; having been more accurately informed, the majority of changes were stylistic as opposed to content changing.
  • One of our clients has been asking us about absence tracking; IST’s tracking system is currently undergoing a security scan and will be offered campus-wide following that process.
    • A demonstration of the program can be given to CTSC following the security scan.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • Last term we added HTTPS security to the front and back end of eValuate; we have now added it to the client as well.
  • Transitioning to the new version of OAT; hoping to be completed by next week.
  • Will be meeting with Andrea Chappell tomorrow for initial discussions into potential of moving eValuate to IST hosted machines.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Reminder of our push to get rid of SSL; we are having issues with all older versions at this time.
    • TLS is now the protocol to use.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on November 12, 2015 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.