Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group (WPAG) February 16, 2000

Attendees:

Terry Stewart Applied Health Science (AHS) Tim Farrell Information System and Technology (IST
Daniel Delattre AHS Ray White IST
Nevil Bromley Arts Bruce Campbell Engineering Computing
Jim Johnston Mathematics Erick Engelke Engineering Computing
  Hon Tam Engineering Computing

Submitted items:

Q: (Nevil) Scratch and Birthday problems.
A: A long description of the problem was entertaining. A few days after the meeting Bruce implimented a temporary solution until the real data can be obtained.

Q: (Nevil) Carl has requested a Windows Scripting host be installed for Polaris.
A: Ray will try to include WSH in the next between term upgrades (or earlier in a testing environment). TeraTerm was also added to the list since there is a SSH capability included in the product.

Q: (Nevil) Request for an immediate method of updating a single or all appfilers
A: Erick said that he would get a tool written to do the triggering and updating.

Q: (Bruce) Faculty authentication and e-mail servers - Engineering and AHS have moved to Solaris, for both Authentication and e-mail service. Support and development implications for Science and Arts.
A: Arts is moving to Solaris for the Watarts replacement services and so Arts will be included easily in all new developments. Science is still a problem however the current system will continue working for a while. Bruce said he was even willing to help move Science to Solaris if necessary.

Q:(Bruce) NetApp Backups - any progress and/or good/bad experience etc.
A: Jim sent a 778megabyte log file to NetApp for debugging purposes no other progress otherwise. Do not know the status of the Rebel hard disk request.

Q: (Ray) April 2000 update will be large and include IE5 so I would like to get some testers as soon as I do the IE5 install which will hopefully be before the next WPAG meeting.
A: Took a vote about other piggy-backed applications such as Active Desktop and Outlook and currently the concensus is we do not see the need for these extra items.

Q: (Nevil) Will there be a path replacement or addition for j:\utl on the appfiler (Q: drive).
A: Erick said yes initially only Q:\GEN\UTL. The longer time plan includes relying upon LDAP for more customized path.

Information items:

(Bruce) Watstar tape backups - not doing anymore in favour of NFS to netapp backups. Math watstar servers are not backed up at all by EC anymore. Final billing will go out shortly.

(Bruce) Sept 1. 2000 deadline for "non account print server" conversions will be it.

(Bruce) Netapp home dir move is delayed a few weeks.

(Ray) Win95install on Development (soon everywhere) includes Sound Blaster CT4700, CT4750 and CT4810 drivers so install.bat has extra options on the command line. ATIRage was moved up one so the end three questions are CT4700, CT4750 and CT4810. Win95install on Development is up to date excluding the JAN2000 update.

(Nevil) Arts will also be moving to Solaris for mail and web services with 2 Sun Ultra 10 machines.

Moving the K: drive applications to the Q: drive was tentatively set for September 2000.