Minutes Waterloo Polaris Advisory Group August 15, 2001

Attendees:

Regrets:

Submitted items:

1) SISP comments
Keith McGowan's email: "With the installation of the new SISP system, it appears that there is an assumption that the main communications link to the students will be through email. And at some of the info sessions that I had the pleasure of attending, there was also an assumption expressed by the presenters that all University of Waterloo (UW) students had email accounts.
Now, unless I'm missing something, we have a significant gap between assumption and reality.
Uwdir has the ability to deliver mail to every student via the email field, but I suspect a large number of those entries are blank. I should have done the parse on the database for interest sake but I figured it was a large enough number anyway.
Engineering used to fill in the email field of any Polaris user whose field was blank. Is that still being done? I think Math used to do the same.
Unfortunately, we have a significant number of users who have home systems and never even obtain a Polaris (or Unix) account. Is this our problem? If it is (or will be) are there any plans?"

There are 3 levels of authentication when logging on to Quest. During SL101 students were given a userid and password, however 80% was not able to logon at the first level and for those who were able to logon there was either no course list or they couldn't register. Unhappy parents and returning students who call the helpdesks don't get any help since the helpdesk doesn't know anything. Scott Nicoll is compiling a list of problems and solutions. The other problem is that there is no Mac client.

2) Passwords and Nexus
Engineering Computing will look into Adman to add an easy way to never expire passwords. Bruce is working on a web interface to change passwords for Nexus/Unix.

3) Generic GPO
The Generic GPO is not finished yet. We will also have to do scheduled reboots for a regular sysctl (similar as in Polaris). The main problem is when and what is the maximum time being logged on before a scheduled reboot is necessary. The sysctl will also clean the temp directory, clean up stub accounts that are left over from possible profile problems (i.e. not enough space to save local profile back to n-drive and no authentication, in which case a local profile is created) and make regular backups of the event logs. 

As for the Bookmark file "conversion" between the old Netscape on Polaris and the new one on Nexus, this could happen in the logon script.

4) Scratch availability
No information yet.

5) Status & Removal of Polaris2K
Polaris2K will be removed shortly, once arts has moved their last lab(s).

Information items:

1) Appfiler and software installs on Nexus
Installing software from the Appfiler is much faster then installing from the memberserver. Hon's recommendation (if you don't want to invest more in servers) is to take down your memberserver and convert it to the new Appfiler and setup a workstation to act as your backup DHCP server.

2) Nexus test
The Nexus Test Environment is up and running now. Super-userid's and passwords will be the same as in Nexus.

3) AHS NetApp to W2K domain
The AHS NetApp will  serve as a test case to move the NetApp into a mixed environment by adding the PDC field and joining it to the Nexus domain.

4) ES and Nexus / ES & Math students taking Arts courses
The question was raised if ES was going to join Nexus.
During the last couple of months IST has done some testing with Windows 2000 and also with the NetApp of ES. These tests are going very slow or don't provide any results at this moment. ES is willing to test the Nexus environment. The main problem might be the needed resources and servers (i.e. 2 servers and 1 workstation). 

In the meanwhile Arts will implement GPO's for the ES and Math OU on Nexus, in order to give access to labs in Arts so ES and Math students can take courses in Arts.

5) Problems with Intel 100 Pro S
Hon suggested to use the net82557.inf file from the 100bdisk.exe distribution, rather than the 100pdisk.exe which is the one that you get from the support site. That
fixes the problems when running a standalone installation. But, it does not work under Polaris. To fix that problem, Hon pointed at the "Intel Pro100+ Lan Adapter
Configuration Release 3.1" disk that came with the Pro100+ Management card. Instead of specifying a 'Intel(R) PRO/100 S Desktop Adapater" you have to specify "Intel(R) PRO/100B PCI Adapter (TX)" (the very last entry in the list). The main difference with the newest drivers (8MB compressed exe file) versus the old driver (just over 800K on a floppy) is that the new one include IPSec and IPv6 and a whole lot of other goodies that are not being used/needed under Polaris.

6) Polaris updates
The license agreement for the current NAV program on Polaris will run out in March 2002. In the meanwhile there are no more updates available for this version. Updating to a newer version of NAV will take up time and space, which could be used to work on Nexus. There are plans to update Adobe Reader to version 5 on Polaris, but again there are time and space issues.

7) Webmail on Nexus fixed
There was a problem with persistent cookies and Webmail on Nexus. The next user could logon to the previous user's email account by just pressing Login. This problem has been rectified.

Created by: delattre@uwaterloo.ca 2001/08/17
Revised by: delattre@uwaterloo.ca 2001/08/29