Waterloo Nexus Advisory Group minutes September 17, 2008

Present

Regrets

Agenda (PDF) items this month

AHS update

• 2 new Vista Nexus labs
• closed one lab due to low usage
• grad labs moving to Vista
• there was a problem with Vista folder redirection corrected by asserting System read permission

Arts update

• Economics department reduced the number of their graduate lab machines. ACO is going to restrict 4 machines in Hagey Hall public lab to Econ grad students
• added 14 thin client workstations in Arts Lecture connected to a W2K8 server
• a number of Pysch faculty have reported problems playing DVDs in their Nexus workstations

Engineering update

• redid 1 lab with space for laptops
• there are load issues on ecefile1 which may be related to new version of Firefox. Investigation ongoing. Load issues interfere with account creation
• ecefile2 is also having issues with profiles maxing out the hard disks. Drives were upgraded to 15K rpm
• Erick has written a tool to throttle down services such as Windows Desktop Search
• Sysctl daemon has had problems on some computers that is believed to be a result of a MS patch. A new daemon will be distributed.
• Vista Sysprep is working
• Samba has to be upgrade with server 2008
• a number of the Nexus DCs will have to be upgrade to 64bit machines in order to run Server 2008. Constitutes should consider contributing to this infrastructure purchase

Faculty of Environment update (Happy 40th. Birthday!)

• all student labs are Dell ultra small form factor 122 machines imaged with RIS
• new student data server W2K with external disk array contains profiles and user data
• ENV will be reclaiming legitimate ENV students that appear in other faculties by September 30
• ENV name change will be rebranded within the computer infrastructure as new machines are introduced

IST

• going to be removing older "linked" versions of software on podium computers
• as part of the Exchange Project any interested staff and faculty are invited to join the pilot. Please contact Tim for details

Science

• rebuilt all labs
• there were some issues with Office 2007 installs on some workstations

Software inventory tool

• Tim demonstrated a software query tool used in ADS that allows computing support personnel to query workstations or OUs
• During the login script workstations report the contents of their HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersin\Uninstall registry which is collected in a SQl database. There is a web interface that can make queries of this information.
• IST CSS will work with Daniel of Engineering Computing to share this tool and possibly develop additional features

Vista

• IST was asked when podium computers were going to migrate to Vista. Tim will take this to IST stakeholders
• Lowell asked if there were any new developments with the Webview signon screen for Vista. Engineering Computing said there was not.
• Lowell is going to strike a Nexus Vista Advancement group to help plan and formalize future Vista development

Downsizing public labs

• AHS has removed 1 lab
• there is increasing space issue pressure to maintain computer labs
• Ray mentioned that in one of the Engineering labs they have more than just Nexus stations with space and connections for laptops. There is demand for these "value-added" labs
• another option is to use "thin client" computers where clients would be able to access multiple workstation solutions one of which would be Nexus

Account creation

• There were a number of Nexus account creation problems from this start of term in AHS and Engineering. It was suggested that perhaps the ad should be prepopulated.

myWaterloo

• It was pointed out that the Welcome to myWaterloo web page is confusing. There are references to this mail entity as both "Nexusmail" and "myWaterloo". It was also suggested to remove the "maintained by Nebula" as no one is really using this name for our group.
• interested parties should mock up a prototype of the welcome page and submit it to the Nebula group

Next meeting scheduled for October 19th, 2008.