We have ordered new projectors (with a brightness level of 6000 lumens) to upgrade the Small Lecture Theatre and JBC Mezz rooms. We are also investigating the replacement of the current atrium screens with asynchronous replication to discrete PCs, as well as the deployment of screens to floor entries, replacing noticeboards with a digital signage solution.
We're progressing the upgrade of viable Macs to OS X 10.6, working towards a target of 300 machines to be upgraded. We aim to complete this project by end Q2 2011. The Managed Software Update service (using munki) for software deployment is being tested by a group of beta-testers in BCDD and MRCPPU, and we are also now testing for a research group in MMB.
We are progressing the Windows 7 deployment throughout the college, targetting GRE and CSI to be completed by end Q2 2011. SLT is scheduled for migration during the summer 2011.
Current projects include testing a Windows 2008 R2 Terminal Server replacement for the TS-BCDD server, joined to Active Directory. We are working with BCDD personnel to test DDU apps for Windows 7 compatibility, in anticipation of Windows 7 rollout Q2/Q3 2011.
On Tue 3 May 2011, during the weekly maintenance period, we used various automated security tools to probe the externally accessible network hosts. This allowed us to assess the security risk to these machines from outside intrusion, and the conclusion was that none of the production services were significantly affected.
On Tue 10 May 2011, again during the weekly maintenance period, we replaced one of our failed VPN concentrators and upgraded the installed software to support clientless VPN access.
On Mon 23 May 2011 we were alerted to a fault in the Call Manager server that runs the University's telephone system and manages the handsets. ICS restarted the server to resume normal operations.
On Tue 24 May 2011 we relocated the TMRC-Link network switch to the appropriate rack.
On Fri 6 May 2011 there was an issue with emails other than @dundee.ac.uk email address not being delivered and this was resolved by ICS later the same day.
The project to outsource University email provision is planning migration of student mail over the summer and considering staff mail migration later in the year. It appears that the project aims to make use of the new Office365 service that Microsoft will be launching soon.
On Sat 7 May 2011 there was an issue with the OpenFiler Storage Array that manages iSCSI-based storage connections. We reconnected the ESX hosts, checked the Oracle backup server, the Filemaker server and restarted the VMWare Backup Appliances to restore normal operation.
On Tue 10 May 2011, during the weekly maintenance period, we migrated all of the proteomics mass spec and mascot data to our new Alloy, tiered storage platform. On Thu 12 May we replaced the controller cache battery in the JBC DS3400 storage controller, which is used by GJB-ORA, GJB-MySQL and OME-Necromancer - the work was conducted without affecting service to these nodes.
On Tue 24 May 2011 we migrated TMRC, JJB and PS labs to Alloy storage. We also upgraded the TMRC DS4800 to 7xx series firmware.
On Tue 31 May 2011 we networked the mascot compute nodes and Abase to both server aggregation switches for resilience. We moved Kraft, and the compute cluster nodes GE-002, GE-003, GE-004 to different network ports.
We are not aware of any issues affecting the Filemaker service or any of the University systems such as Coda or PECOS. If you know of any, please let us know.
There is no news to report apart from related network and storage works that impacted on mascot, Abase and other scientific services.
Current project work includes plans to cross-mount the cluster, LMF and Nemo GPFS filesystems (Q2-2011) and migrate the PostgreSQL server to a virtual machine.
We are also updating the Linux VMs to latest 5.5 via SpaceWalk configuration management (Q2-2011).
On Tue 31 May 2011 several of our file servers began to experience critical problems. This resulted in users having problems logging into their computers and/or accessing their home directories. We had stabilised the issue by the evening by disabling the name cache and restarting the LDAP servers. We identified problems with the Primary Domain Controller (PDC) which manages user and group lookups and alleviated the problem using only the Backup Domain Controller. We subsequently restarted the PDC and the service appears to be working as normal.
We are migrating current static websites to the CMS as well as planning to migrate current CMS sites to a distributed AEGIR drupal system for better performance, management and development (projected start Q3 2011). We will also be updating Alfresco to version 3.4.1 by end Q2 2011.
Current projects include the creation and development of alumni and collaboration capture tools as well as an absence reporting form for Learning and Teaching (Q2 and Q3 respectively).
As of 30 May 2011, there were 831 open support calls with 540 (65%) either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 291 (35%) are pending user feedback.
Web form submissions help us analyse calls by division, and there are currently 332 open support calls logged via the web form.
52 of the open web form submissions are attributed to BCDD, with 35 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 17 are pending BCDD user feedback. 31 BCDD issues were logged during May 2011 and the top 6 categories relate to printer (9), software (6), imaging (3), virus, storage and hardware (2 each) enquiries or problems.
55 of the open web form submissions are attributed to GRE, with 30 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 25 are pending GRE user feedback. 41 GRE issues were logged during May 2011 and the top 5 categories relate to software (15), purchase (5), servers, email and network (3 each) enquiries or problems.
9 of the open web form submissions are attributed to SLT, with 5 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 4 are pending SLT user feedback. 3 SLT issues were logged during May 2011 and these all relate to software enquiries or problems.
