January 2006 Engineering Report

MinUWet - Live Across Campus

The MinUWet program went live on most NAAs across campus on Friday March 17.

A few problems were encountered, mostly owing to slight differences in the various NAAs.

Arts NAA (artserv3) and Science (isthmus) coughed on a space between some arguments. They are running FreeBSD 4.8 and 4.7 respectively. I had tested on 4.9 and 6.0, which both permitted the space. The space is now removed on the distribution.
cn-naa2 had been renumbered and needed additional reconfiguration.
some CLF enhancements were incomplete, leading to an odd error message on cn-naa2 and possibly cn-naa1.

Much of the feedback was due to the above issues and not actually MinUWet-related.

There was one angry Email sent, where the CS user said he would be happy to sign a petition to halt MinUWet. He also had beliefs that antivirus products were not required for him. A few other users didn't want to upgrade to vendor-supported operating systems. Most of them didn't know that XP on laptops boots faster than Windows 2000.

This month I worked on a feature so MinUWet would only need to be run once each week. We'll try to work it in when we rename the NAAs to the new common name.

MinUWet Presentation

I will be presenting MinUWet at a friday morning IST seminar on April 7th.

Planning Faculty 10Gbps Infrastructure

There have been a few instances where some 1Gbps links in Engineering have been saturated. We will need to upgrade two or more links beyond gigabit before next March when the term projects "crunch" hits again. I am planning 10Gbps rather than mere gigabit link aggregation (which would be only a temporary solution).