Committee meeting - December 22, 2016

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
January 12, 2016

Present: 

Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Colin Bell, Steven Bourque, Erick Engelke, Lawrence Folland, Bob Hicks, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Jason Testart

Guests:

David Aldwinckle, Matthew Verlis

Regrets:

Trevor Bain, Andrea Chappell, Don Duff-McCracken, Dave Kibble, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Subzone presentation (Dave Aldwinckle, Matthew Verlis) [20 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of December 8, 2016 [5 min.]
  4. Other Business [5 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [15 min.]
  6. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, January 19, 2017, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Subzone presentation (Dave Aldwinckle, Matthew Verlis)

Dave Aldwinckle and Matthew Verlis presented on Subzone. Topics included:

  • Definitions
  • DNS hierarchy and the Uwaterloo.ca zone
  • Dotted hostnames
  • Record overlap
  • What if the zone isn’t defined?
  • Subzones for groups
  • Subzone guideline
  • DNS views
  • When/how?

View the full presentation on Subzone (PDF).

Chair’s Remarks

  • Met with Dave Kibble to begin discussing the structure of the email project; Lots of work to do on this, will be brought back at a future meeting to discuss.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

Other business

Staff on mailservices

  • Will be reviewing which staff members are on mailservices before deciding what to do with them.
  • The role of mailservices will change drastically when all of the students are off of it.

Roundtable Report

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Been busy installing new server operating systems; SSL was just updated this week.

Computer Science (Lawrence Folland)

  • Creating a distributed file storage system to provide service for NextCloud; planning to go live with a limited roll out in January. All of the hardware is in place.
    • Was formerly called OwnCloud, now called NextCloud.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • Service desk will be open until 4:30 p.m. on December 23 scanning exams.
  • Some of Peggy Day’s staff will be monitoring RTs and email/voicemail over the break and addressing only business critical issues.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • In the process of re-imaging labs to Windows 10 we managed to fix phantom deployments that persisted from problems in August.
  • Some software we install for Arts requires running an application to install; working with LearnLock to write a script to do this for us.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Have upgraded the OS on our NetApp to stay reasonably in sync with IST’s collection of NetApps.
    • Had an issue with a motherboard replacement hardware, so NetApp will be in tomorrow to work on that.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • Undergoing some lab renovations right now.
  • We have 3 co-ops for next term; also have a partial co-op we are sharing with another group to push ahead on working on Scinage.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • CPU load has been jumping up significantly on our Virtual Machines; VMWare has not been able to fix the issue.
    • Adam Savage will be looking into it over the holidays.
  • Our Virtual Machines have also been randomly dropping desktops and we don’t know why; it is easy to fix but we cannot figure out why it is happening.  

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Wrapping up current phase of IAMNG project with respect to correlation to identities of students and Human Resources.
    • Working on the scope of what the next phase will look like; met with WNAG which helped identify the scope.
    • Current (and ambitious) goal is to turn off the old WatIAM sometime in the fall of 2017.
  • Trying out the number 2 response to the RFP for email security, Proofpoint; so far it has been going well.
    • Will make a decision in the new year if we are going to go with Proofpoint.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on January 19, 2017 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.