Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group January 19, 2000

Attendees:

Special guest attendees:

Old Items:

Q: (Duane) Sysctl95 happening at any time.
A: on Erick's to-do list.

Submitted items:

Q: (Bruce) - netapp backups. The legato backups of the netapps don't work at all in some cases, and work marginally in others. Can we get an overview of the progress (if any) made, and history of this problem, from an IST perspective ? Contingency plans.
A: Quite a long discussion ensued after a brief history and synopsis of the problem was given by Mike. Jim has been in contact with an Engineer at Legato and so there maybe a solution given time. Mike mentioned that backups fail sometimes because of network instability so he will get the networking group involved in isolating problems if possible. Alternatives to Legato were discussed but a temporary work around of backing up the files to a hard disk (in or out of the IST subnets) was deemed as more achievable in short term. Beth will contact Rebel and ask them to solve the problem giving them the alternative purchasing the hard disks that are required. Is NetApp willing to pursue this problem is still a question that needs to asked.

Q: (Tim) Y2K Post-Mortem - Did anyone see any problems in their areas?
A: Netscape mail, elm and the Web based email showed date problems. Netscape will get upgraded at the end of term. Elm on Unix is not part of Polaris so it will be fixed on a different timeline. The Web based mail system should be fixed already.

Q: (Bruce) - watstar backups. Given the success of the NFS backup system, and lack of concerns raised to date, EC is probably going to discontinue running tape backups of watstar servers within the next 1 to 2 weeks. Issues. Alternatives.
A: No big issues came up. Bruce did mention that he would be working on a batch migration tool for moving accounts over to the network appliances.

Q: (Bruce) - non accounting watstar print servers. printers attached to ports on watstar servers, and non accounting watstar print daemons can be converted to new methods (unix , NT) anytime. I'd like to work on setting a deadline for the discontinuation of the watstar non accounting print service.
A: September 1, 2000 was set as a proposed deadline to move non-accounting printers to alternatives. Although many alternatives are available the network connected printer was mentioned as probably the best alternative so we can get away from serial and parallel attached printer problems and speed issues.

Q: (Bruce) - departmental MAD k: disk. I'd like to work on setting a deadline for the discontinuation of the departmental K: disk, in favour of the app filer disk.
A: Arts is optimistic that they will have the K: drive moved over for the start of the Spring term. No proposed deadline was set yet. Jim has a problem with the NetApp since it requires a valid password before the share can be mounted; there is no solution to the password problem yet. See the last question in the list for more details.

Q: (Bruce) - Are there any other watstar features we can stop using now (or soon) so that when the real Phase II deadline is selected, we have as few remaining issues as possible.
A: Deferred to the next meeting.

Q: (Bruce) - Intel/Unix. EC is moving to Solaris/Sparc for some main systems, but we will also be examining Solaris/Intel for other systems. If it is equal or better that FreeBSD, we *may* consider moving all remaining FreeBSD, even if they are not experiencing problems. Issues.
A: Deferred to the next meeting.

Q: (Ray) Space on E: disk. We have run out of disk space again in e:\w95 which may make it impossible to install new applications or updates. I have already removed any redundant files and moved as much as possible, without removing parts of an application to other drives however Windows still insists on putting DLL's into e:\w95\system.

There are four possible ways to move forward:

1. Repartition/reformat the hard drive to make E: larger.
2. Take over the F: drive and move one or more of the installed applications on the E: to the F: drive - may involve repartitioning and purchasing of new hard drives
3. Move an application or two off the E: drive and put them onto a Network drive. The list of applications are below any suggestions?
4. Put on a new version of Windows: possibly Win95b (I don't know if it is feasible yet) or do what I can to keep the programs current and move to Windows 2000 on an advanced timetable.

The following programs are on the E: drive:
 

A: Repartitioning/reformatting was currently rejected since we will probably need to do this for Windows 2000 and visiting the stations twice was too human resource intensive. The quick short term solution is to split up MS Office so that the clipart is moved off the E: drive. The next step will be to deal with Corel WP Office Suite possibly by splitting it up (is this possible?), removing the least used sections (log files indicate still quite a substantial usage of QuattroPro and Presentations) or moving it altogether to a different drive (which Arts objects to). Win95B was not discussed however a brief mention of Hon doing a small synopsis of difficulties for moving to Windows 2000 was mentioned.

Q: (Nevil) Can something be done so the desktop settings are saved on Net app accounts? ie) stop the auto arrange of new  icons.
A: If we knew why this wasn't being saved we would fix it. It does not appear to be a registry setting.

Q: (Nevil) Can the removal or relocating the clipart on the E drive be considered as an option for saving space?
A: Ray - yes although I don't like splitting application apart. It is considered the short term solution for disk space but we don't know how much time this will buy us.

Q: (Nevil) Can the wording of the scratch options be looked into or changed for less confusion when the web version is implemented?
A: Yes

Q: (Nevil) Can an office flag be added so office machines can use j:\utl3\admin /unlock without a privileged account?
A: Yes, Erick has already sent out the patch. The flag is c:\polaris\flags\office and is documented in the regular web space.

Q: (Nevil) Is there any way of keeping the duplexing tray installed using SMBPRINT on the HP4000? Can the ppd file be copied and edited for a duplex capable 4000 and used in the pdrivers.pol?
A: Yes, A January sysctl will include the modified ppd and pdrivers.pol files.

Q: (Jim) The stuff that we have on K: is pretty big. JBuilder takes 15-20 seconds to load on a standalone system. It take at least 3 minutes normally. Considering the 15:1 station:server ratio that we enjoy, switched 100MB ether and the current load on hooke, I predict that our stations will actually see longer load times if we move our K: apps to Q:. When we originally configured our lab stations we included large disks such that we have F: and G: sitting idle. The original intent was to clone the K: on F:, but file protection of F: didn't work for a while, then there were other issues, and now it'd just be a hassle to move. Since we are now talking about the end of K:, I'd like to discuss using F: as a clone of our K:/Q: and optionally use the Q: as a central distribution point from which SYSCTL could grab updates for F:.
A: Given that the NetApp is more efficient at transferring files then the Watstar servers both Erick and Bruce think that there should be little if any performance decrease in using a Q: drive. The Q: drive is larger than the 2Gig limit allowed by DOS so it is impossible to move all of the Q: drive over. Moving only the Math part over is currently not supported as well the F: drive write protection is not written yet.

Q: (Jim) We still mount our NetApps on P:, and are still using watstar N:. We have a couple of reproducible cases where users have n:\etc\usefiler files and we are getting files created on N:. Worse, the n:\etc\polconn.ini has been created and corrupted several times. Has anyone else seen this yet? I doubt that it is interference from NT-TSE, but I won't rule it out.
A: Erick - the only file read from the N: drive is n:\etc\usefiler all others are not used however in certain circumstances when Windows shuts down the local profile is copied twice, once to the NetApp and once to the Watstar drive. Except for the extra time it takes to shutdown the computer there should be no problems with this behaviour.

Q: (Jim) Related to the above, we'd really, really like to separate our user file space such as:
 

To this end, how can we configure Polaris to use N:\Polaris as its root? Most apps that I've looked at can be configured to use subdirectories. And since the W95 stuff that shows up on n:\ is either copied by hand or via special variables set in Polaris configs, are there any other real issues preventing such a change? If for no other reason, it would make is so
that we could tell our users, "You are done with Polaris this term. To recover quota, rm -fr ~/Polaris." Currently, I
couldn't tell them the entire list of things to delete. Worse, since NT-TSE uses some similarly named files/dirs, I can't be
sure which environment created what. I'm trying to get our NT-TSE moved into a subdir as well. Even if we were to
junk NT-TSE and the Macs today, I'd still feel strongly that Polaris should move to a subdir.
A: Currently this is not supported and would be quite a substantial development effort. We will keep this suggestion in mind when developing an MS Windows 2000 based Polaris system. The consulting offices should all have a list of files that can be removed when resetting an account. I'll get Stephen Carr to email Jim a copy of the resetting account instructions.

Q: (Jim) We don't use Q:, and it causes us a lot of problems when users change their UNIX password, then the next time
they login they can't get the Q: drive because the stored password is out-of-date, and they aren't prompted for a new
one. At this point we'll see 'Polaris not responding', and if we kill it we're fine. Will it cause any problems to not supply a
server for our Q:? IE. does the "stock" polaris require anything from the Q: yet?
A: Yes more and more applications are being installed or moved to the Q: drive. The J: drive is slowly being moved to Q:. Once the LDAP database is up we will be able to move all the K: drives as well. A solution must be available soon.