Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group (WNAG) minutes October 19, 2005

Present

Department Advisor name
Applied Health Science (AHS)
 Lowell Williamson
Computer Science
 Steve Nickerson (chair)
Information System Technology (IST) Tim Farrell (secretary)
  Steve Carr
Science
 Steph Sempson
Engineering Computing
 Daniel Delattre
  Erick Engelke
  Ray White
Environmental Studies (ES) Marko Dumancic
  Bernie Rutter
Math Jim Johnston
  Naji Alamrony

Regrets

Department Advisor name
Arts
 Nevil Bromley
Engineering Computing
 Hon Tam
ESAG Peter Routledge

Agenda

XAS

  • Steve Carr reported that the are two installations of XAS on campus, in Engineering and in IST
  • On December 12, 2005 these two are going to be merged into one.
  • The change should be transparent to users

Upcoming Watitis

  • Steve Carr reminded of everyone of the upcoming Watitis Conference here at uWaterloo and canvassed others experienced with managed laptops.

Documentation group report

  • The Nexus Administrators Documentation sub group (Lowell, Naji, Bernie, Scott Paterson and Tim) met on October 6, 2005.
  • It was decided to use a Twiki as the submission, editing and retrieval technology.
  • The sub group is working on the structure of the Twiki based on a wish-list of what is desired and appropriate authors will be requested to provide the desired documentation.

Science student problem

  • Steph mentioned that any Science students taking an ES course that requires their N: disk to be increased to 600mb. are getting corrupted profiles. This is a result of the "My Documents" folder to get replicated recursively many times on the user file space till it fills.
  • Using the "-" signon option helps.
  • There was some discussion about possible reason but in the end Erick said he will investigate.

Firewall advances

  • Erick has been working with the IPFW "toilet-tank" shaping component and reports that the tool can:
    • restrict network through-put to so many kb. per second.
    • can set an overall user daily limit currently set to 1.4gb.
    • the average user will not notice any of the ceilings. This strategy is designed to block those few individuals who are consuming massive bandwidth downloading non-scholastic related items such as DVD movies.
    • Any of the ceilings can be set by local admins so that in the case of where students do have an academic requirement to download large files they will be able to.
  • The group agreed in principle to come up with common rules for student labs.

Nexus servers

  • It was suggested by Erick that we migrate the various core and faculty Nexus servers to as few subnets as possible.
  • Currently the servers that constitute the Nexus environment are distributed across many subnets and require many exceptions in allow lists.

ES Staff N: Disk Problem

  • Bernie noted that some staff members in ES have had their N: drives created on Arts filer space.
  • Erick will investigate and suspects this may have resulted from a previous fix from the beginning of term issues with W2K3 SP1 as reported at the September 21, 2005 WNAG meeting.

CS Student computing labs

  • Stephen Nickerson reported that CS may move three labs (MC3004, MC3005 and MC3027) away from Nexus for the Spring 2006 term.
  • One of the issues cited is a problem where users do not always get the Q: drive linked in. AHS and Math also echoed this experience.
  • Erick said he would investigate.

Symantec Antivirus 10

  • Engineering Computing is planning to upgrade to SAV 10 at the end of this term and prior to the beginning of Winter '06.