Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group November 17, 1999

Attendees:

Nevil Bromley Arts
Stephen Sempson Applied Health Science (AHS)
Jim Johnston Mathematics
Erick Engelke Engineering Computing
Hon Tam Engineering Computing
Tim Farrell Information System and Technology (IST)
Ray White IST

Items submitted:

Paid account extension system to be discontinued - No discussion since Bruce was unavailable.

Printing - The development laser printer is currently using the cash database off a Unix server and the plan is to move all the cash databases over to Unix servers soon. According to Bruce's web documentation this is a port of the current system as a temporary first step (of course that is what was said about the current system years ago). Laserman changes to users is now done via a web form. The hooks for supporting Samba printing and CAS (or other accounting package) should now be easier to implement.

Scratch overhaul - no one seemed overly concerned about useridless logins however the web based scratch is eagerly awaited.

LDAP discussion was sidetracked by what software/hardware/OS we would be running as the LDAP server rather than the fact that we would be using LDAP.

Advanced password - no discussion since no one is using it.

K: disk discontinuation - some discussion, a possible deadline date of May 2000 was suggested. Ray's strategy is to go back to the original install disk for any MS Windows 95 software, Windows 3.11 and DOS applications typically are a straight copy and sometimes a modification to the INI files. Nevil's good addition is to install on a local hard drive which has had the SUBST command used, thereby eliminating the any \\appfiler mapping.

Are you "NetApp ready"? Arts wants (needs) some testing time. Science is still in the testing phase.

Any plan to remove NetApp accounts? Not designed yet, this might be one of the first uses of LDAP.

Locking out of non-registered students from Polaris labs - small discussion, current disabling of Watstar logon will prevent this except for the web based email.

Arts lab machines are GuiBoot, Yay! Nevil is testing Erick's migration procedure.

Duane's email - a small discussion. Scott proposed making a description page (decision tree) for who should and should not be using Waterloo Polaris. Generally Duane's email was had too few specifics to deal with any problem issues.