Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group (WNAG) Minutes June 18, 2008

Present

Department Advisor name
Applied Health Science (AHS) Lowell Williamson
Engineering Computing Daniel Delattre
  Erick Engelke
  Hon Tam
  Ray White (Secretary)
Environmental Studies (env) Bernie Rutter
Information System and Technology (IST) Tim Farrell
Science Steph Sempson (Chair)

Regrets

Department Advisor name
Arts Nevil Bromley
Computer Science Steve Nickerson
IST Steve Carr
Math Naji Alamrony
  Jim Johnston

Agenda items this month

Administrivia

New Chairman and Secretary: Chair - Lowel Williamson, Secretary - Tim Farrell

Due to various holiday conflicts, July and Augusts' WNAG meetings are cancelled. If there is need for a meeting contact the group via the mail group.

Distribution of XP SP3

IST has just released XP SP3 from their WSUS server as of yesterday. Arts and others have already started getting the service pack.

Engineering WSUS SP3 is group configurable, contact Hon if you want a different schedule. ECE has moved their labs over; the rest of the users will be moved August 5th after classes end. The ESQ used labs will wait until ESQ is over which will be Frosh week.

Nexus and student email project

Ray tried to relay everything he knew about the project but he cannot take notes and talk at the same time, so contact me if there are any questions.

myWaterloo - horde

www.uwaterloo.ca now links to www.nexusmail.uwaterloo.ca which the Thwate certificate also corresponds to. Hopefully this linking will reduce user confusion but since there are multiple cnames associated with www.nexusmail.uwaterloo.ca users may still be confusing the names.

Software upgrades

Daniel has a list of software to upgrade for the September term. These include the Nexus Common Application which will be split into Nexus Common Services (emerge etc.) and the Nexus Common Application such as Firefox, Thunderbird etc. Certain software in these groups will not be upgraded if there is no need (no security problems etc.) but likely most applications will be upgraded and Eudora may be removed if there is little usage.

Scientific computing will have Matlab and Comsol upgraded and if necessary Mathcad and Maple.

Software problems

Adobe and Apple products now come with a peer sharing product called bonjour. Uninstallation appears to cause problems. Daniel suggested that the Enterprise software distributions of Adobe and Apple products likely will not contain bonjour.

Vista deployment

Daniel is testing software for Vista and will likely have one Engineering lab upgraded to Vista by the September term.

Hon has spent a great deal of time working with the tools necessary for Vista deployment. Hon has a Windows PE disk available with some VB scripts to help install from the network. The VB scripts assume that the one partition can be overwritten before installation so if you need a different install contact Hon. Currently you need to remove the XP object in Active Directory or the Vista install will not work (will hang), once Vista has created the object in AD there is no problem reinstalling Vista. This problem is related to a bug in the sysprep code that Microsoft supplies to create images.

Next meeting scheduled for September 17th, 2008.