Committee meeting - October 06, 2022

Sarah McKone  
Secretary to the Committee     
October 6, 2022 
    
Present:  Steven Bourque (chair), Andrew McAlorum, Bill Baer, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Greg Parks, Lori Paniak, Nick Springate, Paul Miskovsky, Pratik Patel, Robyn Landers, Trevor Bain 

 
Regrets:  Adam Savage, Pam Fluttert, Jason Testart 

 
Agenda   

  1. Chair’s Remarks 
  2. Approval of the minutes from Thursday, August 25, 2022 [5 min.] 
  3. Discuss eduroam outages (Lori Paniak) [10 min.] 
  4. Discuss future of DNS, IPAM, and practices (Erick Engelke) [10 min.] 
  5. Discuss N Drive status (Don Duff-McCracken) [10 min.] 
  6. Roundtable discussion – all [20 min.] 
  7. Next CTSC Meeting [Will be held Thursday, October 20 at 1:30 p.m.] 

Chair's remarks 

  • None. 

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting  

  • The previous meeting’s minutes were accepted as distributed.  

Discuss eduroam outages (Lori Paniak) [10 min.] 

  • There have been increased connection issues recently, users are able to connect and then being disconnected, and some users can’t connect on one device but can on another. What specifically is causing authentication issues and is there a way to provide better notice of outages, so users do continually try to connect? 
    • There have been two authentication issues this fall, in September the alert was delayed, in October the alert was sent within minutes. 
    • It is not the same authentication issues from years ago and appears to be self-correcting. The vendor, CISCO, is investigating. Priority for investigation decreases once services have been restored. 
    • When you enter a new space, disassociate and re-associate with the SSID because you may be connecting to the AP in the previous space. 
    • Exclusions are disabled, but randomly some clients are being excluded temporarily and then they are unable to connect. It is being investigated at the engineering level with CISCO. It does not appear to be impacting many individuals. 
  • Are we doing redesigns when we install the new AP’s? 
    •  The upgrade is simply redeploying the units where they are, redesigns and moves can be completed as necessary. IST has worked with SAF where wi-fi was required for the entire class to complete instruction. This is possible with the proper design. Some classrooms may need newer design, some may be sufficient assuming there is up take for wi-fi 6 from the clients.  
    • The amount of money to do a seat high density area is significant and cannot be applied to every classroom.  
  • Steven to send CTSC a recommendation for new wi-fi requirements that can be shared with clients.  

Discuss future of DNS, IPAM, and practices (Erick Engelke) [10 min.] 

  • Engineering Computing sent out a notice, moving away from dynamic IP issuing, there are a lot of security alerts go out without a way of tracing them to allocate machines in the IPAM system.  
    • Can Steven investigate dynamic and registered requirements? This would give mobility and some forced authentication for users in machine.  
  • Dynamic DNS registration in future system.  
  • Groups registered departmental tech list in IPAM, security notifies whoever is the tech in Jira and puts it in the ticket.  
  • Desire to see generic and mailing lists automatically added as customers in Atlassian 

Discuss N Drive status (Don Duff-McCracken) [10 min.] 

  • Are students automatically being provisioned with N Drives?  
    • This is not standardized across faculties, some are not doing it, some are doing their own thing, and some are still offering it. IST would like to get to a place where N Drives are no longer being provisioned.  
  • When is End of life for faculty group N Drives? 
    • April 2023 for faculty, this was not confirmed for students, and it would be ideal to align this with faculty. May need to investigate specific use cases prior to end of life for students. 
    • The Environment Faculty is utilizing IST N Drives for lab environments. This feels like a quick timeline. 
    • Faculty of Health relies on the N Drive to spin up Jypiter Notebook. Health will need to be consulted to discuss further.  
      • A Netdrive could be discussed with Robyn if this agreeable to the Associate Deans of Computing.  
    • Looking to develop a long-term solution. OneDrive is great for personal and student use but may not meet the needs of all use cases.  
      • Consideration of the future of conventional labs with AVD. OneDrive must be synced before AVD is shut down in the labs, concern with terminations or power outages.  
      • Large data sets may require another solution. Having storage available on campus is going to be useful for big data courses and research. The storage environment will continue to exist outside of the N Drive. 
      • Some research contracts require storage outside of a cloud environment. 
    • Lisa to meet with Environment and Health to discuss a timeline and a solution for replacing the N Drive. 

Other Business/Roundtable 

IST, Andrew 

  • There is a Campus IT Grouper group with ~400 people in it. When IST moved to JSM this Grouper group was added to have access to the IST project, and automatically granted a license. Of this group, there are 54/399 users that have never accessed Jira Service Management, due to licensing limitations we cannot continue to have this volume of licenses not being utilized. We are looking at potentially changing how this automatic access is granted and will notify of these changes through communications.  
  • Maher will be the project manager for the asset management review. Maher will set-up use case consultations to understand the current state of asset management and needs. Andrew would like a contact to be provided for all faculty IT.  
  • Steve and Andrew are co-sponsoring the Endpoint Management project. ~30 people attended the information sessions with SoftChoice. They are looking to do consultations with the SCCM administrators and others who do end-point management across campus to gather feedback on what they want in an end-point management solution.  
    • Lori offered a JAMF orientation and in the future, this will likely be helpful but not at this time.  
    • Would like to ensure the university owns the hardware, faculty X buys something, and then it belongs to the employee because it’s dropped off at their house (AutoPilot).  
  • The IT Review kick-off was last week, associate deans of computing are the co-leads for each of the 7 themes. Some themes will need more consultation (ex. Working together and researching computing). 
    • If you search UWaterloo IT Review, there is a website and link to the publicly available PDF of the IT Review. 
    • There may be a need to reconsider how the pandemic has impacted campus computing, as the review was completed before this time and perspective may have shifted (ex. Flexible work environments, communication tools) 

Health, Trevor 

  • Health has seen an increase in demand for video conferencing support. Are other faculties seeing this, what are they doing? 
    • MFCF has not seen this 
    • Science is encouraging departments to purchase their own equipment, originally had been purchasing Meeting Owls to provide to departments. This does still require delivering the set-up to these spaces and assisting as necessary. They are attempting to teach faculty to encourage them to be more self-sufficient with this. (ex. Encouraging them not to rely on wireless and bringing cords) 
    • This has required some enforcement around the timing that support is offered to ensure defenses are not being clustered around the long weekend. 
    • Carts are geo-restricted.  
    • Erick consistency is important for faculty members so that it is not installed differently in every room to ensure ease of use.  

Math, Robyn 

  • Concerns with the message from the IST Security team, “this must be fixed in two days, or we can escalate and unplug you”, regardless of severity. The issues will be resolved but not everything can be met with a 2-day urgency. This concern has been shared with Mike Patterson. Steven confirms that when this timeline was not met, they were given a de-escalation procedure and were not unplugged.