Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group (WNAG) minutes September 15, 2004

Present

New Logon Page

• To be generated by PHP
• Created by OUs (blocking enabled)
• Fine-tuning to be done, eventually to work off of a server
• The importance of a 'consistent' interface across campus

Scratch (Account Creation Tool)

• Assumes that a unix account for the student does not exist
• Creates password (based on rules defined by faculty) then ssh's into the host and runs the acct command
• Then sends password to the AD
• AD accounts are already created via adman, possibility of having unix accounts batch created and just 'sitting' there
  • Problems
  • Creation of spam
  • Users show up in the wrong group
• Bruce expressed the hope of having the "New Users" link work in all faculties

WNAG report to UCIST (Steph)

• Steph inquired re: topics to report on to UCIST & how previous presentations were developed
• Suggestions:
  • Success of a peer group (Bruce)
  • The success of 'on the edge' security (on the local pc)
  • Flexibilty of NEXUS

Windows XP Service Pack 2

• Network services at startup are killed
  • No warnings given by MS, deemed it to be virus-like activity
• Executables now give warnings
• IE security has now increased
• Issues with ArcGIS in ES were solved by deploying SP2
• Other faculties have not deployed yet
• iST SUS to deploy soon
• EC warned about VB6 and ngina.dll failing if distributed

Power Outage of September 12th

• Notification procedure to be adopted
• Shawn expressed concern on how faculties were notified, namely the timeliness
• Other faculties did not express concern

Other business

• Jim is having issues with MAIL and Mail and mail on N: drives due to Math's network storage device
• Podium PCs to be on 53 subnet throughout campus
• DNS registrations should be .nexus.uwaterloo.ca for NEXUS workstations, webservers excluded