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MinUWet - Live Trial

The MinUWet program was added to the Engineering NAA for a trial.  The results were very positive, with the following numbers recorded in the first six days:

 

1176 users in 3663 NAA sessions were granted limited access because they were found to run Windows.  113 users were running non-Windows systems and were allowed to pass with no further requirements or restrictions.

 

41% of the Windows users (480 users) in 1666 NAA sessions decided to run MinUWet.  (It started around 30% for two days, then jumped to 65% for the last few days, after we improved the documentation and web page design.) We would expect the participation rate to continue around 60% based on the trend data.

 

25% of users (120 users, 215 sessions) initially failed the MinUWet test for minimum standards.

 

However, 49 users (41%) who failed later registerred a MinUWet success. The most likely explanation is that they patched up their systems, which also explains why the failure rate fell to about 10% per day for the last four days.  This is significant because I believe MinUWet is mostly responsible for this positive improvement.

 

Reg's snort system only detected one suspect computer, but it was for a virus predating the computer's virus definitions, so it was likely a false positive.

 

I believe MinUWet achieves two goals.  

 

The NAA current code base allows one to upgrade to the newest NAA look and then enable/disable MinUWet as a single line config file option.  Engineering will continue using MinUWet while others decide what to do elsewhere.

 

Engineering Computing Moving

Engineering Computing is moving its offices and most of its server room to the new SharcNet building, officially considerred an extension of the Physics building.  

 

Service disruptions will be brief, as we will use this occasion to phase in some replacement hardware for key servers, turning them on in the new building while turning off the old ones in the old building.