Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group December 15, 1999

Attendees:

Nevil Bromley Arts
Stephen Sempson Applied Health Science (AHS)/Science come next month
Terry Stewart AHS
Jim Johnston Mathematics
Bruce Campbell Engineering Computing
Hon Tam Engineering Computing
Tim Farrell Information System and Technology (IST)
Ray White IST

Old items:

Paid account extension system to be discontinued - No change until LDAP services are established.

Submitted items:

Migration - Bruce modified Acct to rename accounts instead of removing them entirely to help with this problem. New *.run scripts were added in the new year.

Description Page, decision tree for who should be using Waterloo Polaris - Scott and Nevil are to look into this since this issue seems to affect them directly.

Clarification on Y2K status - All software should be Y2K compliant NAV 2000 was added for the Y2K compliance. Old programs such as Watfile are typically not Y2K compliant when using date comparisons (who does this?). Watstar servers have been Y2K compliant for many years.

Midday GUI boot sysctl - Erick was not available for comment although this has been passed to his long to-fix list.

Desktop not being saved on Guilt machines - Restricted to some user's it seems. Erick was not available for comment although this has been passed to his long to-fix list.

What Acct tools are available for managing Unix Accts (specifically NetApp interface) - suu, nquota, modify, add, show etc. are available if Bruce's tools have been added. Nevil will bug Keith to bug Bruce about getting the software installed in Arts.

Are there procedures for fixing NetApp accounts - Steve Carr has some procedures we will try to get them emailed/posted for erasing the necessary files for resetting accounts which use N: drive from the NetApp (involved FTPing from another account currently).

Have there been any problems with NetApp accounts - cannot state that errors have not occurred however usually the corruption has already occurred and moving these corrupted files to the NetApp can cause problems. Always do a scan disk on the Watstar N: drive before moving the user/files to the NetApp. Snapshots are available if errors do occur (which we have not seen - although crashing Microsoft (MS) Windows could cause bad/corrupted data).

On a related note sometime a web form will become available for the user to be able to reset his own account on the NetApp.

Extra discussed items:

Trashed inbox problems - AHS brought it up but it seems to be a Unix problem.

Mirapoint discussed - in the meantime Engineering has opted for a SUN solution for the next couple of years, we will review Mirapoint and it's competition in a few years time when the SUN solution is no longer sufficient/desirable.

Legato and NetApp OS updates discussed - not all problems have been resolved with Legato backup however a potential Legato security hole has been fixed.

Q:\ARTS\ETC\Winlogon.bat for Arts (Carl) - possibly related to LDAP query will discuss this with Erick.

ICQ required for Arts course - we would like to know who came up with this rumour. ICQ licensing/network traffic was not favorable for the University six months ago someone will need to investigate this if indeed ICQ is required for courses.

Userid's ending with numeric digits problem - Erick was not available for comment although this has been passed to his long to-fix list.