Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group September 19, 2000

Attendees:

Submitted items:

Q: (Nevil) Hanging during the login/startup procedure is a real problem (I hope to have some more info for the meeting). The Arts Co-op seemed to think this is happening more often. We have tried to modify the login with people to test the log in and log out process. We seem to see this to happen in 1 out of 20 tries.
A: (Tim) Was it behaving like this or did SysCtl change it? At Renison we had some stalling at the same place for this reason.

(Nevil) A Ctl-Alt-Del with bring up the tasks, that part is still the same.
(Tim) We had problems on his machine. I remember Erick saying the video adapter was the reason for problems in Renison. The video is a Trident Video card, and setting the card to lower resolution worked.
(Hon) The Webpage (http://globe.uwaterloo.ca:80/polaris_signon.html) was originally set to 16bit color, this has now been changed to 256 color.
(Ray) In another instance, a Dean Office network connection had this type of problem. After laying a new wire, everything was fine after that. I will talk to Erick since he had some tools for resolving problems.
(Jim) Watch the Cisco switch settings. One can have a 20-30 sec delay if the port is not set properly ie. ports should be set to "port fast" in "span tree". We had to go back and change some connections that were good before being connected with the new switch.
(Ray) ShellIconCache is not related to the hanging problem, it is only related to the speed at which the "Start menu" shows up after clicking or pressing the menu key. It may need to be read off Q: drive if they are not installed or copied over. One place the system can die is when trying to get net connections. It is best to reboot, if network problems persist, it would be best to fix them. One can speed up the logon process by making sure the cached version of Shell Icons is in C:\W95, note that the file does have a long file name, so it will be seen as Shelli~1.
(Jim) Can anyone check Netscape's downloads of Zip files. We tend to have them renamed to .ARC files, but if shift-clicked they can be saved as Zip. I may have done something in the past which is causing this, but was just wondering if others are having this same problem.
(Nevil) I recently did a download of a Zip and it was saved as .zip type.

Q: (Nevil) Instances of viruses being sent from students on Polaris to people with virus detection have been reported. Several requests from the admin staff for some form of virus scanning software. Can anything be done?
A: (Hon) It should be noted that some Virus scanners (such as Norton or McAfee) do not detect the same viruses. I have tested certain viruses in which Norton did not see, yet McAfee did detect.

(Ray) For those who were not here last month, the update of Norton had a devastating effect on file access time. A simple test showed the OS accessed a file 2000 times. This is a ten fold increase of when Norton AV was disabled. This translated into over a 20 second delay and half the time the mouse appeared to be disabled. Sysctl does check nightly for viruses when automatically run.
(Jim) Could we have a one-shot execute off of Q: drive to run when needed?
(Tim) IST had students come in with files that had viruses. I was surprised to find that they were getting viruses from their Polaris accounts, since in the past I knew, that could not be the case.
(Ray) We had updated the virus definitions on Version 6 which put the program into a tailspin. Right now, there are a list of things to do eg. Java, Help for Visual Studio, etc. as well as Norton Antivirus Version 7. As soon as I get to installing version 7 I'll either add version 7 on the workstation (with an associated sysctl) or make Norton Antivirus available elsewhere.
(Hon) Is anyone running out of space in their staging area of their AppFiler?
(Nevil) No, Arts moved off some applications, so there is more space.
(Jim) Math added new Disks, so Hooke has lots of space now.
(Ray) Space is a concern, we have one course that has 300 Megs of digitized video mpegs.
(Hon) Engshare is getting small in space, so each of the faculties might want to check their usage.

Q: (Nevil) Should we be backing up Win 2000 servers and what is the recommended method?
A: (Hon) Engineering is backing up the domain information onto 2 other machines. One cannot duplicate the DHCP server except in the mirror.

(Ray) This is true for some services.
(Jim) Any backups with IST?
(Ray) We will find out on Thursday or Friday how that is going. Manfred was to check up on the Legato client.
(Jim) We had the Legato backups working and it seems to be doing the right things.
(Ray) Manfred was to run a test of all the Student Database and then do a recover of it. There are potential problems in that if one looses the machine, the SID's won't match on a 'replacement' machine and you subsequently cannot restore. Currently, we are just using redundancy now RAID 1.

Q: (Nevil) Any progress on moving printers.pol to the Q drive?
A: (Ray) We are looking into this, one should be able to add, so long as the Q: drive is linked in. This will be added in an Erick To-do list.

(Nevil) I noticed this with the color printers in Fine Arts.
(Daniel) Is there a driver for the HP 4050?
(Ray) The 4050 will use the 4000's printer driver. The print database moved over a year ago to a Unix based system. Mike Hurst put in the links for Samba mounts. There is currently 3 printers set up this way, one of which is a 4050. The reason for doing things this way was for the migration to Win2000.
(Steph) I have noted some Laserman problems and was wondering if others have had this problem show up. I have a userid which seems to create an account, but does not show up in the database, thus no funds can be added.
(Ray) Bruce can look at this next week.
(Steph) Relaying Bruce's info: there is a bug in laserman where it won't add a user which is alphabetically after the current last user in cash.dat kluge fix is to manually create a user ZZZZZZ@WHATEVER (userid@server). Be careful if you edit cash.dat, the records are 64 chars exact, and include a CR-LF pair, even though it is on unix.
(Jim) When adding to the K: drive, what exactly is checked. I am finding that things do not seem to be working for WinLogon.
(Ray) About ten different things go on at once during logon. I added a Pif file copy so that things do not get missed.
(Hon) Yes, but remember that Pif files cannot be created on Samba shares.
(Ray) Shortcuts is what I use for things like this. This is one of the reasons why I want to re-do the menus.
(Tim) I was wondering about the conversion of printers off the Polaris servers. I have had complaints about a ZZ printer not found.
(Nevil) Watch the routes and local printers used. Check that the correct names are in the .POL files.
(Ray) Erick's program gives this error message if something is incorrect.
(Hon) I had a ManSc machine and user getting connected with Electrical's printers.
(Ray) You could see about modifying or checking the printers.rec file.
(Nevil) Arts installed a software package last fall, which worked fine then. Now, some students are crashing if they try to print.
(Ray) This does make sense, when considering the amount of open files. If a program cleans up after itself, you will tend to find this type of sporatic behavour.

Information items:

(Daniel) Math Cad 2000 - When is it up and running?

(Ray) It is up and running on Q: drive and should be in the Start Menu. The Start Menu updates only occurs once at the start of the term. I do want to clean the menus and then just refresh them sometime this term. I
do not currently do an IDent, but rather an over-write.
(Tim) On the whole, Scratch has gone very smooth this term.
(Ray) Yes, we have even been complemented on it, in particular, by the Engineering undergrads.
(Jim) We are intending to open up to all of our students having accounts since we have more resources to allow all students to get accounts now.

Created by: sempson@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca 2000/09/20
Revised by: sempson@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca 2000/10/16