One of our Mac desktop specialists, Phill Jenkins, has relocated to China and we wish him well. Paul O'Connor continues to manage the Mac desktop service with part-time assistance from Simon Wong (web assistant) and Alastair Mathers (Windows specialist).
One of our database administrators, Kashif Munir, has relocated to England and we wish him well also. Jonathan Downward continues to provide database support for our database infrastucture, encompassing Oracle, MySQL and MSSQL (SQLServer). Note that the Filemaker database service is managed by Kiran Oza.
We are advertising for a specialist to look after the compute cluster, web applications and provide database (RDBMS) cover.
We're progressing the upgrade of viable Macs to OS X 10.6. Based on machines reporting in to our managed service (Apple Remote Desktop), our target is approximately 300 machines, and 30% of these are already using OS X 10.6. We are now aiming to complete this project by end Q2 2011, aligned with the Windows 7 rollout.
Current projects include evaluation of munki for software deployment, and upgrade of Adobe apps to Creative Suite 5.
Apple launched the iPad 2 tablet on 2 March and it's now available in the UK, but with the usual stock shortages. Several people in the College have iPhones, iPod Touch and the original iPad, so please let us know what you use them for and which business and/or scientific areas you think these devices would be useful.
On 1 March 2011 the firewall services module was upgraded to apply a security fix; this was done during the weekly maintenance window without interrupting network services.
Current project work includes dynamic VLAN assignment to access ports (evaluating the open source PacketFence NAC product)
On 1 Mar 2011 the University's Groupwise service was offline for CLS users for a brief period. We also received reports of a performance drop for WebAccess users on 3 March, although Windows/Mac Groupwise clients and IMAP users appeared unaffected.
On 18 Mar 2011 we were alerted to a significant number of users affected by a change in their email quota allocation. This appears to have resulted from an administrative error in ICS and following our request, email quotas were removed for affected users.
We scheduled a day of fileserver maintenance for Saturday 12 March and this was completed as planned. The work was necessary to move the last remaining disks from one of our storage arrays nearing the end of its current life and necessitated a small amount of downtime for each fileserver as it was moved. The work did not affect LMF or cluster users as they do not use this particular storage array.
On 14 Mar 2011 the TSM server for ICS was unable to clear its log and thus all operations were running very slowly.
We are currently migrating our mirrored SVC storage for Virtual Machines to our second facility in Post Genomics to provide room level resilience.
There were some login and service issues with PECOS (10, 21 and 28 Mar 2011): the University CAPS team notified all PECOS users and the issues were resolved by the service provider (Elcom) later the same day.
We have been advised by several users that they can no longer use the Filemaker 5 application from our apps share, so we have migrated these databases to a current version of the file format and relocating the databases to our Filemaker server. Users can access their migrated databases using Life Sciences logins; connection details are available from the LSC wiki. If you need your databases migrated or you need to buy a Windows/Mac license for Filemaker 11, please let us know.
We currently have 23 support staff using the TS-SUPPORT Windows server, which gives users access to a Windows desktop and applications that can be used remotely from any workstation in the College and (via VPN) machines from home. You can also initiate long web searches, remote printing and other tasks from home so they can complete while you travel, as well as enabling easier hotdesking if providing support for colleagues. If you would like more details, please let us know. Note that we're also setting up these Windows servers for other groups/divisions where required.
We use the 2X application publishing server for named support staff to use the University's VISA transaction log, and testing this system for more effective access and controlled use of licensed apps such as Filemaker and several of the financial apps used by the CLS Finance team.
On 10 Mar 2011 we scheduled work to migrate the Pipeline Pilot server's disk to SVC managed disks. Users were notified in advance of the work which was completed later in the same morning as planned.
Support call statistics
As of 29 March 2011, there were 743 open support calls with 476 (64%) either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 267 (36%) are pending user feedback.
Web form submissions help us analyse calls by division, and there are currently 294 open support calls logged via the web form.
45 of the open web form submissions are attributed to BCDD, with 32 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 13 are pending BCDD user feedback. 39 BCDD issues were logged during March 2011 and the top 3 categories relate to software (8), network (6), and imaging (3) enquiries or problems.
48 of the open web form submissions are attributed to GRE, with 30 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 18 are pending GRE user feedback. 33 GRE issues were logged during March 2011 and the top 3 categories relate to software (10), purchase (4) and email (3) enquiries or problems.
6 of the open web form submissions are attributed to SLT, with 4 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 2 are pending SLT user feedback. 5 SLT issues were logged during March 2011 and these relate to imaging (2), hardware, network and user account (1 each) enquiries or problems.
We are about to start the migration of divisional and lab websites to the CMS; GRE and Life Sciences Computing are in the progress of being transferred. The CLS Impact and Outreach website has been migrated to the CMS as a test case.
We are scheduling the Windows 7 deployment throughout the college, with CAHId rollout complete for staff computers (teaching-related machines planned for the summer break 2011); SLT rollout planned for the summer break 2011; MMB rollout is ongoing with most groups completed.
Current project work includes the deployment of private VLANs for all instrument/acquisition machines, with a target of end 2011 for completion. We are also planning to evaluate software deployment and imaging via System Center Configuration Manager 2007. We are testing a new version of the OCS server used to record configuration information about Windows and Mac computers as well as remote installation of Windows apps and printer settings. We're enhancing our use of the 2X application publishing system for virtual access to Windows apps not installed on the local machine and aim to deploy the 2X web portal by the end of Q2 2011 to improve access to these apps when away from work.
We are planning to introduce a supported Windows 7 netbook into Stores in the near future. Please let us know if you would be interested and which business and/or scientific areas you think these devices would be useful.
