Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
May 31, 2017
Present:
Bruce Campbell (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Colin Bell, Steven Bourque, Andrea Chappell, Lawrence Folland, Don Duff-McCracken, Dawn Keenan, Dave Kibble, Robyn Landers, Andrew McAlorum, Adam Savage, Jason Testart, Ray White (guest)
Regrets:
Trevor Bain, Erick Engelke, Paul Miskovsky
Agenda
- Chair’s remarks [5 min.]
- Approval of the minutes of the meeting of May 11, 2017 [5 min.]
- WCMS outages (Andrew McAlorum, Steven Bourque) [5 min].
- Other Business [5 min.]
- Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
- Next CTSC Meeting
[Will be held Thursday, May 25, 2017, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]
Chair’s Remarks
- Bruce Campbell thanked Dawn Keenan for her contributions to the committee over the years and wishes her best of luck in her future endeavors.
Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting
The minutes from the previous meeting were accepted as distributed.
WCMS outages (Andrew McAlorum, Steven Bourque)
Andrew McAlorum discussed the recent outages of the WCMS that has been caused by a bug discovered in MariaDB.
- There is a ticket in with MariaDB to resolve this but they appear unsure how to fix the issue at this time.
- Due to the increased frequency of the outages we have decided to move back to MySQL and will continue to investigate ways to improve the system.
Other Business
Samba vulnerability with Linux systems
- This vulnerability affects writable Samba shares.
- The Security Working Group was informed last night.
- Similar to WannaCry version 2 but not as big of an impact since it is only affecting Linux at moment.
MATLAB outage
- MATLAB is very important in the Math faculty; it does not go down often but it is critical when it does.
- Should there be some thought put into relocating the license server to support it? And more closely monitor it?
- Will follow up with Will Lewis and Steve Carr.
Network RFP
- Does it directly affect remote campuses that are not in Waterloo.
- No. It only affects the Waterloo campus. Satellite campuses had an RFP go out a couple years ago to address their network needs.
- The RFP was awarded to Rogers.
Follow up on status of EC5 machine room
- Nothing new to report.
- In the absence of an anchor tenant or some other driver, IST is in a holding pattern with the room.
- Will need direction from the Associate Provost, Resources to let us know what the room should/will be used for.
- Bruce Campbell will address this topic with the Office of Research and Associate Provost, Resources again.
Roundtable Reporting
Library (Adam Savage)
- New System Administrator in the Library, Nick Springate
Client Services, IST (Andrew McAlorum)
- Starting to communicate more about UWaterloo Scholar; it is now a fully available service.
- There will be an article in the Daily Bulletin tomorrow regarding this.
- Eric Bremner and I will be doing a bit of a roadshow to discuss it with groups and help with onboarding.
- Had a presentation from Science last week on MarkBox; looking good so far and could be an eventual replacement for Scantron.
Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (Andrea Chappell)
- The Video Storage and Delivery project has gotten responses from a number of people in different areas across campus so far. If there is interest in this in the faculties please let me know.
- Continuing to look at learning spaces and active classrooms.
Arts (Dawn Keenan)
- The power outage on Tuesday kept some of our buildings offline for quite a while.
- Investigating whether we need to update our disaster recovery plan; IST’s network group was very helpful during this process.
- Noticed that there is a problem with our use of BitLocker on our laptops; working on a fix for it now.
Math (Robyn Landers)
- We shut off some old Samba servers and applied a workaround for the few others that need to be running.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be held on June 8, 2017 at 1:30pm, in EC2 1021.