Attendees:
Nevil Bromley Arts
Jim Johnston Mathematics
Hon Tam Science
Erick Engelke Engineering Computing
Ray White IST
Topics
Ethernet cards
Ray and Nevil lamented the failure of DLINK 530 Ethernet cards (Virge chipset) when installed in newer >200 MHz CPU systems. The same cards work fine if an older P100 ship is installed on same motherboard.
Network testing - RWTEST
All have done some testing and will do some more before September.
Hon identified mismatch problems in some intermediate switches which were killing performance for whole blocks of switches and this should rectify some known problems in Science.
Norton Antivirus and sysctl not always working as expected, but in several solved cases it was network wiring/duplexing which was at fault. So rwtest improvements may solve these two symptoms.
GUIboot
It appears to be working well for all. It appears all labs (except some departments in Engineering) will be converted for September.
Noted that Control Panel applets work correctly, and screen saver added for login prompt.
All previously supported login-time batch files are run except: winpre.bat and winpost.bat
NetApp for N:
Immediate availability of NetApp N: disks was announced by Erick. It works well and fast, but needs some more error detection to deal more reasonably with issues like network connectivity errors, password errors, etc. Those changes will be roled out in a few days using sysctl.
Due to vacationing knowledgeable NetApp folks, several people needed quick instructions on how to set up temporary NetApp accounts so they can test things this week. Erick emailed instructions.
We noted that Unix access to the NetApp could be used for account resets, or even account population, though the later is no longer an issue because population takes almost no time on the netapp.
We noted that WinNT will conflict with Win95 and overwrite the profiles and desktop for users who migrate between them. This is a Microsoft problem because MS products decide to do that overwriting.
In late August, Engineering Computing will decide whether or not to proceed with first year students on our NetApp. Currently it looks very promising.
Instructions: http://polaris/system/station/smbserv.html
Printing/CAS
UCIST is forming a subcommittee to look at campus printing, so we will likely wait to see its findings.
Also noted that there appear to be Y2K issues with CAS, we will investigate further.
Other topics in brief
- sysctl package for August not finalized, disccusion of what will be added
- Jim mentioned obscure password checking problem, something for Bruce to look into
