Attendees:
Nevil Bromley Arts
Stephen Sempson Applied Health Science (AHS)
Dave Walsh Engineering
Marko Dumancic Environmental Studies
Jim Johnston Mathematics
Hon Tam Science
Bruce Campbell Engineering Computing
Erick Engelke Engineering Computing
Tim Farrell Information System and Technology (IST)
Absent Ray White IST
Group housekeeping items (Tim)
The name "Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group" was accepted by all as the official name of this body. WPAG will meet the third Wednesday morning of every month from 9:30 to 11:00 in MC-1058. Tim will set up a group web page to house meeting minutes and other applicable information. Tim will also arrange for a mail listserve for the group. Group mandate was accepted.
Engineering computing information
Network Appliances (Bruce)
Bruce reported that four out of eight Network Appliances have arrived on campus, two in IST, one in Engineering and one in AHS. The other four are to arrive some time this week. CIFS load testing on Net App in Engineering has been delayed due to other pressing network problems for Bruce but he should be able to do so very shortly. It is hoped that all users’ N: disk space will be migrated to appropriate Network Appliances by the beginning of September, 1999.
User WWW space can be hosted on the Net App but due to file permission issues, the users will still see this web space as their W: drive. Users should not set "World Readable" file attributes to any of their files on their N: disk. A "World Readable" file on the N: disk will pose a security/privacy problem once a system snapshot has been taken. Users cannot edit their own snapshots so if a file gets backed up with the wrong file attributes, correcting the source file will not change any previous snapshots.
Bruce documents his Network Appliance progress on his site.
CAS (Bruce)
Currently there are several printing mechanisms around campus, Laserman, CAS, and Arts has its own solution. The end result for users is that they can only print in areas where they have set up a print account. The current Laserman system will not work under Waterloo Polaris Phase II. With CAS clients will be able to print on any CAS supported printer. Clients’ print accounts will be managed centrally by IST. Bruce has already written the Watcard Swiper interface for CAS and there are two in operation today, one in Engineering and one outside the CHIP in MC. Currently CAS supplies funds for Terminal Server accounts and printing for MFCF and the Twinkle labs. There are still some technical issues to work out such as upgrading the Unix box that CAS runs on to handle transaction load.
Bruce has documented his work on CAS at his site.
Appfilers (Erick)
There are currently six Application File Servers in place. They are all running on Free BSD boxes except the one in Math which is running on their Network Appliance. Faculty Appfilers are updated from the master once an hour. A new redundancy feature will be released shortly that will provide users with another Appfiler if their home one is down. Erick is going to write documentation on how to update master appfiler
LDAP (Erick)
LDAP services will take over the role currently provided on Waterloo Polaris from the network I: BOOT disk. It is currently in test mode using a freeware product from the University of Michigan. This product may not be suitable for large scale production requirements of Waterloo Polaris so something such as Windows 2000 Active Directory may be used.
Items Submitted by Arts (Nevil)
Q. Is there a proposed schedule for the rollout of the Net App?
A. (Bruce) Migrate users’ N: to Net App by September 1999.
Q. What is the current status on the Net App and are there any problems?
A. (Bruce) See Net App plans (Erick) GUI boot testing and N drive on the appfiler testing is planned to start first week of July
Q. Can/will web space be hosted on the Net App?
A. (Bruce) Yes
Q. Does the Net App handle encrypted and clear text passwords?
A. (Bruce) No, in our case, we are going to use UNIX style passwords.
Q. Is there a process in place for updating the \\appfiler\system from the engineering appfiler yet and if not when?
A. (Erick) Yes, files have to be in correct location to get distributed.
Q. Will it be/is it an automatic event and how often?
A. (Erick) Yes it is automatic and occurs once an hour.
Q. Can the update be forced?
A. (Erick) Yes.
Q. Is it identing or just copying and not deleting?
A. (Erick) It is currently just copying and not deleting.
Q. Has anyone figured out a way to setup HP Deskjet 600/692 printers with the new system of pdrivers.pol?
A. (Ray) Never tried. (Group) There was some discussion about experiences with installing HP printers in general and the problems posed by bi-directional parallel devices.
Q. Will the control panel applets (Screen saver, keyboard, mouse, fonts) work under gui boot or be fixed under pboot?
A. (not dealt with)
Q. Has anyone else seen _hash files in n:\netscape and figured out why?
A. (Ray) My assumption is they do not have the correct files in N:\Netscape if the files exist in N:\W95\%userid% copy them to n:\netscape\%userid%.
Q. Will the roaming profile problem of deleted desktop/recent files reappearing from N: be fixed with guiboot?
A. (not dealt with)
Q. Is there a known/conceived life span for Polaris servers?
A. (Bruce) Watstar server termination date, September 2000.
Q. How often are virus definition files updated, and how would a manual update affect the machine/sysctl?
A. (Ray) If you have privileges to do a manual update it will not affect _sysctl since the next time _sysctl updates the files it will just overwrite the previous ones. Virus definitions are updated at least once a term. They are also update when someone reports a virus has gotten through or special circumstances like when the Melisa virus was released.
Q. Is there a list of compatible/non-compatible hardware for Polaris?
A. (Ray) Microsoft has a list of hardware supported under Windows 95A. The only thing we have run into is the AMD 350Mz+ chips are not supported under the current version of Windows 95 we are running on Polaris. (EC) Martin MacLeod of Engineering Computing also maintains a list.
Q. Can driver files be updated without a reinstall?
A. (Ray) Yes with difficulty, take a look at the web page for more details. It all depends on what the driver updates when it is installed whether you must follow the detailed Web page instructions or do a simpler update.
Q. Can some of the install drivers be updated? (eg ATI cards and SMC9432)
A. (Ray) Do you mean on the Win95install disk or during an install or a _sysctl?
Q. Is the licence server now working and what went wrong?
A. (Erick) Yes license server is now working.
Q. Are there any tools for testing installed software to stop the vdv.386 problem repeating?
A. (Ray) No other than human testing. Testing programs are designed to stress hardware or software but not do the same steps a human does. My opinion is that testing software wouldn't have caught the VDV.386 problem since it couldn't report the correct problem/cause. Remember it took everyone about 3 weeks to notice and report the problem even after all the test computers were running it for a month before.
Dept command (Nevil)
Nevil raised the issue of the Dept command. Due to the large number of non-Arts users that take Arts courses they require easy access to software on Arts servers. Migrating software to AppFiler will help the situation but there is still the problem of Start Menu and registry items. Bruce and Erick suggested a special network-wide Arts icon may solve the problem.
Next meeting: July 21, 1999. MC-1058 9:30-11:00 A.m.
Notes reported by Tim Farrell
