Computer Committee Minutes

Date: November 15, 2005

Attending Committee members: Roger Crawfis (Chair), Mike Compton, Jim Davis, Mario Lauria, Raghu Machiraju, Kyle Moore (Undergrad student rep), Rick Parent, Jerry Sabin (Grad student rep), Prasun Sinha

Attending (others): Ted Welch, Shaun Rowland

Minutes

• Mike reported on the empending power utilization problem and the plan IICF has to remedy it.
  • All of the 8th floor power is connected to the UPS, which is maxed out and some equipment will need to be moved to commercial power.
  • Caldwell UPS is also around maximum capacity
  • Several major hardware acquisitions are in the works that will require upgrading the buildings power
  • Impact: Expect some downtime over the next couple of years due to this change over.
• Mike reported on the purchase of a major storage upgrade:
  • $474K was utilized to puchase 50TB of new storage
    • 35TB will be placed in Caldwell and used for mirroring and back-up storage.
    • 15TB will be placed in Dreese as usable storage.
  • Do not expect disk quota updates until Spring quarter
• With the new storage, research machines will be backed-up to the Caldwell disks without a media cost. Researchers will still ned to pay for the client software, and if they want tape archival will have to pay for the media charges as well.
• A more regular and predictable maintenance window was requested by IICF. After some discussion the committee voted to approve Sunday mornings from 7am to 12pm as a maintenance window for the computing environment. It is not expected that the machines will always be down at this time, but instructors and researchers and adviced to schedule around this time frame.
• The committee discussed the status of the software packages (usually open source). These are usually updated every break, but have not been for two years. Shaun indicated that they would need to rebuild them from scratch and the complexity of some of the packages (dependencies on other packages) makes this a lengthy process. The long-term plan is to switch to Linux where many of these packages are supported by the Linux vendor, or the installation is greatly simplified over the Solaris environment.
• A discussion on whether to drop official support for Netscape in favor of support for Mozilla Thunderbird and FireFox ensued. The Netscape Calendar is a separate program and can/will be retained. Other Netscape support will be removed.
• There is a need for webmail as SSH is hard to access at some locations. There has also been requests for Blogging or Discussion groups. Mike will look into these and what the new Carmen package offers and come back with a recommendation at the next meeting.
• Our next meeting will be Wednesday 11:00-12:30 in mid-February.

Roger A. Crawfis

Computer Committee Chair