Minutes - September 12, 2003
1:30-3 pm - Belk Library Room 119
Persons Present:
Ex officio members: Jeff Williams (ITS, Chair), Doug May (ACS)
Voting members present: Al Harris (College of Business), Kevin Howell (College Fine & Applied Arts), Greg Lovins (Business Affairs), Emory Maiden (Arts & Sciences), Ed Pekarek (Arts & Sciences), Don Rankins (Registrar), Dick Riedl (College of Education), Peter Wachs (Student Development), Bill Ward (Academic Affairs).
Guests Attending: Tom Bennett (Library), Larry Boyer (Library), Tom Culver (Network Services), Doug Brantz (Fine & Applied Arts), Thomas Van Gilder (Arts & Sciences), Pamela Graham (Arts & Sciences), Bill Harbinson (College of Music), Michael Bennett (Reich COE), Tom Leonard (University Advancement), Mick Kreszock (Instructional Technology Services).
1) Welcome & Introductions
Jeff Williams called the meeting to order at 1:30 PM and greeted the membership, thanking those attending for their willingness to attend. As a new member, Emory Maiden introduced himself to the group. It was noted that we were still waiting on student representatives to be appointed.
2) Planning/action/policies to minimize future virus/worm attacks
Williams began this discussion by briefing the group on the outage Thursday morning, September 11, due to loss of electrical power to the Raley computer room. A mistake was made during the inspection of the fire prevention system, triggering a major shutdown. It took most of the day to restore all services, but there were lingering performance issues with VMS.
Doug May discussed the sequence of events dealing with the Blaster worm problem that hit on August 19th. An automated process was put in place to make sure a computer had applied the critical patches and was cleansed of viruses before network registration could take place. This prevented further resource issues by preventing infected computers back on the network. ACS has implemented a process to use the auto-update feature to download updates from a local server and install them on computers attached to the network. The user will have the option to reboot, but not to have the updates downloaded and installed. May stateed that users must agree to use this process to have network access. After some discussion, the group agreed this was justifiable and necessary to protect the campus resources. On faculty and staff State owned devices, this requires the Netware client to be installed. For personal computers attached to the network whether they belong to faculty, staff or student, they would be required to make sure their computers were had current updates.
Tom Culver updated the group on several network expansion options. One option being investigated is the further separation of the residence halls to prevent the impact on services in the event of another major virus attack. Other plans include the replacement of the core and edge hardware over time to push control of the network closer to the user’s device and take advantage of newer technology.
3) SCT Banner Update
Greg Lovins reported on the progress with implementing the SCT Banner software system. Human Resources went live in July 2003 and there are on-going activities to work out issues. The Web for Employee component should be available soon which will allow users to access information on the web about Human Resource and payroll. Lovins reported that we are currently participating in training for technical, Finance and Advancement as we prepare for an implementation in July 2004.
4) Pharos Printing Update
Doug May reported that he has been discussing the various options with the SGA on the printing credit. In the past, current students could pick up a card at the beginning of the each semester with $6 encoded. This was to provide a transition for going from a free printing to a per-page charge system. The new Pharos system has been very successful in eliminating waste, but the question about the credit keeps coming up. May has suggested to the SGA that if the credit was eliminated, then funds could be used for other things in support of the labs including newer workstations, expanded hours and software. He is waiting on the SGA to make a recommendation. It’s a matter of where to spend the available funds.
5) Email migration for faculty and staff
Williams gave a status of the email migration of faculty and staff to the iPlanet (appmail.appstate.edu) system. The planning efforts have been accelerated due to the VMS response issues over the past several months. Two critical pieces need to be implemented before we begin the wholesale migration. The first is account management in AppalNET. Currently faculty and student accounts are being created and maintained, but we need to address the issue of disabling and possible reactivation of accounts. We have to develop a similar process for maintaining staff account. The second piece has to be with backing up the data with an option to restore files at the user level. At this point, backups are done for catastrophic failures. The advantages of migrating email remain the same as the original discussion last year. That is, users will have one enterprise email to manage without the necessity of managing multiple accounts. It will help resolve some of the password synchronization issues. At some point, we will no longer automatically generate VMS accounts for all users. Users that have a need for this resource will be provided with another process to request accounts. It was pointed out to the group that is has also been discussed in the Friday morning technical consultant group.
6) Adjournment
Williams adjourned the meeting at 3:00.
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