Engineering Systems Administrator Group

Minutes March 25, 1999

Prepared by Bruce Campbell

Present:

• Chair: Erick Engelke, Engineering Computing
• Bruce Campbell, Engineering Computing
• Martin MacLeod, Engineering Computing
• Ray White, IST
• Dave Walsh, Systems Design
• Mike Herz, Civil Engineering
• Bernie Roehl, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Steve Hitchman, Mechanical Engineering
• Beth Jewkes, Engineering Computing

Regrets:

• Dennis Herman, Chemical Engineering

Agenda:

Waterloo Polaris Phase II discussion

Discussion:

1. Martin: to be attending cabling committee meeting on cable labelling. Rules for new labels. Discuss relabelling existing cables.
2. Application server discussion. Idea of master/slave servers. All slaves will be mirrored from the master. A staging area will allow testing before distribution. All servers will have approximately 18GB disk, and be NFS/CIFS accessible. Requires public access (access from anyone) - could be a problem for an NT implementation since it requires userids - will need an authentication solution to allow public access on NT. Most app servers will be freebsd boxes. Hourly distributions plus a trigger mechanism. Allow 1 GB per org-unit. Need to design tree hierarchy. Need for detailed description of how it will all work. Possibility of copying existing J: and K: disks to app server to boost performance until those disks are no longer needed. Installation of an app server is optional - we'll see how the performance goes with the planned one or two servers in Engineering.
3. Printing and CAS. Need to move away from existing watstar printer accounting, and watstar print serving. CAS seems reasonable, but NT support appears to be lacking. Bernie plans to try cas printer accounting on Unix.

Next meeting: (continue discussion of Phase II issues)

Thursday, April 1, 1999, 1:30pm, CPH-2375.