Committee Meeting - December 10, 2015

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
December 21, 2015

Present: 

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

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Paul Miskovsky, Sati Singh

Agenda

  1. Chair’s remarks [10 min.]
  2. Approval of the minutes of the meeting of November 26, 2015 [5 min.]
  3. Review of CTSC agenda topics [30 min.]
  4. Other Business [10 min.]
  5. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.]
  1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, January 7, 2016, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 111.]

Chair’s remarks

  • ¼ of the floor space the new data centre in EC5 will be used for a SHARCNET cluster by Compute Canada.
    • There will be lots of space available if anyone is interested in exploring using it they can contact Steven Bourque or Bruce Campbell.
    • This space is intended for campus use and will be managed by IST.
    • Still a year away from it being available and decisions still need to be made regarding cost recovery for the space.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The minutes from the meeting on November 26, 2015, were accepted as distributed.

Review of CTSC agenda topics

  • It has been a while since we have reviewed the long term agenda topics for this committee.
  • Jason Testart can provide an update on Identity and Access Management in the New Year.
  • Regarding topic of software development, Dave Kibble will contact Bill Ince for his notes to move forward with it.
  • The lab safety inspection software that Science is working on would be a good topic/demonstration for this committee.
  • Topics covered by other technological committees on campus could provide topics of interest for CTSC.
  • Trevor Bain volunteered to begin looking at electronic classroom support; currently doing an audit regarding this in his own area.
  • Bob Hicks has volunteered to look into the topic of learning what others do for a specific IT activity and efficient communication; will report back at a future meeting.

Other business

None.

Roundtable Reporting

Applied Health Sciences (Trevor Bain)

  • Beginning to do more elaborate testing for Mac management through SCCM.
  • Microsoft Office 2010 is now off of all of our managed workstations.
  • Looking at expanding our use of Skype for Business throughout the faculty; currently have 26 users.

Technology Integrated Services (Steven Bourque)

  • Eduroam security certificate has been updated.
  • Sent an email out to the group regarding turning greylisting back on; at this time we are unsure if it reduced the amount of spam getting through.
  • The Research and Aging building in AHS is now online.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

  • Pocketnexus has many new features; single sign-on utility for laptops and home computers (PC and Mac).
    • Can autocomplete VPN (PC and Mac – have to configure your security settings for VPN keystrokes for Mac because OS/X requires you to enable remote keystrokes for security reasons.
    • Can download software purchased in the campus software store (Windows and Mac).
      • Only lists software you are registered to receive
      • Download and mount ISTs (PC and Mac), EXEs/MSIs (PC)
      • Has a progress indicator – ISOs take a while to download.
    • Map Nexus network home drives (PC and Mac)
    • Maps Nexus network printers (PC and Mac)
      • Mac version will need some tuning as it assumes Postscript on the printers, needs a flag for PCL.
    • Available now at http://dark.uwaterloo.ca/pocketnexus
  • Classroom Lockdown Utilities
    • Several integrated utilities for teaching classrooms using Windows and Nexus.
    • Autologin; bulk set stations to log into a local account.
      • Useful for exams
      • Similar command to return to normal logins.
      • Sets the password as specified.
    • Lockdown adaptive firewall
      • sample given with LEARN settings, can only get to LEARN, CAS, and a few other select sites
      • On non-allowed pages, fails immediately, no timeout
      • Learns IP addresses from applications' DNS queries so it works with cloud-based apps like LEARN
      • Tested on an actual LEARN exam
      • Firewall settings stay active through reboots
      • Features a logging facility, so you can detect DNS queries for things like license servers and adjust your settings for future sessions appropriately.
      • Logging lists DNS, calling application, IP addresses and whether the access was permitted or not
    • Classcopy; similar to Classnet hardware, but in software.
      • Unlike Netsupport School, this scales because it doesn’t use connection based TCP, but rather broadcasts or multicasts.
      • Averages 20 frames per second in our tests, but exact frequency varies with a lot of factors.
      • Teacher takes over screens of the users and imposes the teacher screen. Closing the broadcaster returns student workstations to normal mode.
      • User execute; send remote commands that execute in the user’s process space.
      • Think psexec, but in our user space, not the system space
      • Can start up applications of our choosing, e.g. launch the web browser with a particular URL for an exam.
    • Network drive lockout; prevents users from mapping other shares.
      • Useful during exams
      • Home drive maps in, but user initiated share mappings fail.
    • These features are all available now, but we will probably fine tune them over the coming months - http://dark.uwaterloo.ca/lockdown
    • All settings are controlled by a Unix or Windows serve (WAMP/LAMP) with PHP in your area. You can script them so you need not stick with EngComp’s user interface.
    • Software is free for use at UW. It uses some libraries that are licensed for our internal use.

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

  • There will be 11 days between the holidays that we will need to monitor the service desk phones; if you would like to add anything to the voicemail we would be happy to do that.

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

  • Interested in using Skype for Business.
  • Most of our Adobe Acrobat Pro upgrades have gone through; have had some issues with the webstore and have been working with Will Lewis to resolve them.
    • Most issues have been resolved.
  • We have been getting a few requests for use of our lab space by people outside of Arts; we try to make it available if it is not being used within the faculty.
    • An ongoing pain point is that it is difficult for someone who is not in the faculty to know what space is available on campus.
    • This would be an interesting open data project; a directory to show which space is available on campus.
  • We have been continually updating the faculty hiring software that we got from Computer Science; Herbert Balagtas is the main person working on it.

Math (Robyn Landers)

  • We have updated the functional level of our Active Directory to 2008.
  • Revived our lab usage stats gathering and began using Grafana to visualize the data.
  • Getting close to being able to offer OpenScholar researcher sites.
  • Have been discussing internally about the EC5 data centre opportunity; there is some uncertainty regarding operational questions.

Library (Carl Nagel)

  • Last week we pushed out Office 2016 to our staff.
    • Planning to update all of our public workstations soon as well.

IT Security (Jason Testart)

  • Looking at changes to how certificates are issues for non-routable IP addresses.
    • Will need to change our strategy on how we issue those certificates

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on January 7, 2016 at 1:30pm, in EC2 111.