Committee meeting - March 31, 2016

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
April 11, 2016

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, Sati Singh, Jason Testart

Guests:

Kevin Scully

Regrets:

Colin Bell, Dave Kibble

Agenda

  1. IST’s virtual environment (Steven Bourque, Kevin Scully) [15 min.]
  2. Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
  3. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of March 17, 2016 [5 min.]
  4. AssetMan demonstration (Erick Engelke) [25 min.]
  5. Student email in the cloud update (Bruce Campbell) [10 min.]
  6. Date selection for decommissioning campus news server (Steven Bourque) [10 min.]
  7. Other Business [5 min.]
  8. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, April 14, 2016, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

IST virtual environment (Steven Bourque, Kevin Scully)

Steven Bourque presented on IST’s virtual environment. Topics included:

  • IST environment
  • Physical and logical VM diagram
  • House of Brick
  • Test VMware environment
  • SpecInt summary
  • I/O summary & test highlights

View the full presentation on IST's virtual environment (PDF).

Comments & discussion

  • To what do you attribute the big improvement in Input/Output (I/O)? 
    • Spreading it out on the NetApp and having newer hardware.
  • We are hoping to move everything we can over to this; 80% is already virtualized.

Chair’s Remarks

  • If you have not done so and are interested, please respond to Shawn Winnington-Ball’s inquiry about file sharing (distributed via email).

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.

AssetMan demonstration (Erick Engelke)

Erick Engelke presented on AssetMan. Topics included:

  • Why?
  • Comments
  • AssetMan
  • Read only/read write attributes
  • Change log
  • Asset GUI features
  • Software inventory
  • APIs
  • Status late March 2016
  • Missing functionality
  • Next steps

View the full presentation on AssetMan (PDF).

Comments and discussion

  • Not yet being used in production in Engineering Computing.
  • There are lots of things that can be added to this including fields for software end of life, invoice numbers etc.
  • It has groups of users that have different viewable scopes; can be modified.
  • Next steps are to begin using it for Engineering Computing to get our assets organized.
  • Need to determine what it is we want to accomplish and what the use cases are for different areas.
  • IST doesn’t have a current project happening for asset management.  

Student Email in the cloud update (Bruce Campbell)

  • Will be creating a project page that will include FAQ as well as a forum for feedback.
  • More information to come on this topic.

Date Selection for decommissioning campus news server

  • Looking to choose a date to decommission the campus news server; some areas are still waiting to hear from their staff/faculty regarding use of the news server.
  • Tentatively choosing September 30, 2016 as the date of decommission.

Other business

None.

Roundtable Reporting

Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)

  • In the information collection stage now with the Teaching and Learning Spaces committee; sub groups have been created for the different areas.
  • Met with Paul Miskovsky and Mirko Vucicevich to discuss eValuate; looking to get feedback from faculties and students now that the term is ending.
  • Video storage and delivery system: Small team within IST right now looking at a streaming server with storage access and control around it.
    • Will provide more information as the project continues.

Environment (Marko Dumancic)

  • One of our last remaining satellites at 195 King St. is being decommissioned today (March 31).

Computer Science (Dave Gawley)

  • Will be having someone come in from JAMF to do training on the Casper Suite; may be a couple extra seats if others are interested in learning more about it.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • Dell Canada will be doing a roadmap session on Wednesday, April 20 in MC 2009 if anyone is interested in attending.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

  • eValuate is going well; crossed the 50% response threshold which was a target we set.
  • Emailed all of the professors their individual stats for the term and it provides a reminder to send out their survey’s one more time.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • Have yet to hear anything formally about the upcoming power outage in MC.
  • Inquired about what other areas are using for their Linux server environments. Responses are as follows:
    • IST: RedHat and Oracle Linux; a few Ubuntu
    • CS: Ubuntu
    • Environment: Fedora, some CentOS
    • AHS: RedHat
    • Library: Ubuntu, having moved away from Debian
    • Science: mostly Debian, some Ubuntu
    • Arts: mostly Ubuntu

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • Began evaluating a product called vArmour which puts a firewall around all of your VM servers.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Email distributed to the committee regarding disabling network ports for printers that do not “reside in an appropriate private RFC 1918 netblock assigned by IST TIS.”

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on April 14, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.