We're progressing the upgrade of viable Macs to OS X 10.6, working towards a target of 300 machines to be upgraded (31% done). We aim to complete this project by end Q2 2011, aligned with the Windows 7 rollout.
The Managed Software Update service (using munki) for software deployment is being tested by a group of beta-testers in BCDD and MRCPPU.
There is no news to report regarding service issues or planned maintenance for data and voice networking.
Current project work includes dynamic VLAN assignment to access ports (evaluating the open source PacketFence NAC product). We're also implementing BackTrack automated tools to scan external and internally presented hosts for remote exploits, aiming to complete by Q2 2011. We're also investigating the costing IPv6 deployment with a target for early next year (Q1 2012).
There is no news to report regarding the University's email service.
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. Both migrations aim to use variants of Microsoft's Live@Edu system.
There is no news to report regarding service issues or planned maintenance for managed storage.
We are currently migrating our mirrored SVC storage for Virtual Machines to our second facility in Post Genomics to provide room level resilience. Transition to our new Alloy storage product has begun and uses iSCSI disk to provide storage at a more economic rate than the current Bronze class.
Subsequent to the unplanned issues using the Filemaker 5 application for some users, those affected databases have been migrated to our Filemaker server. We plan to remove access to the Filemaker 5 application for all remaining users so if you have any database using this file format, please let us know.
The dotmatics service has been reconfigured so please let us know if you are having any problems with this.
We're planning to update the compute nodes to CentOS 6 when it becomes available, circa Q3 2011. Similarly for SGE and enabling SDM for power management.
We're aiming to cross mount cluster, LMF and Nemo GPFS filesystems by end Q2 2011, as well as migrating the PostgreSQL server to a virtual machine.
We have completed testing of the Spacewalk configuration management utility and cluster nodes are being migrated, due to complete by end of Q2 2011.
Support call statistics
As of 28 April 2011, there were 783 open support calls with 495 (63%) either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 288 (37%) are pending user feedback.
Web form submissions help us analyse calls by division, and there are currently 325 open support calls logged via the web form.
52 of the open web form submissions are attributed to BCDD, with 37 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 15 are pending BCDD user feedback. 33 BCDD issues were logged during April 2011 and the top 4 categories relate to software (8), user account, printers and hardware (4 each) enquiries or problems.
51 of the open web form submissions are attributed to GRE, with 28 either scheduled or waiting for LSC staff to progress. The remaining 23 are pending GRE user feedback. 25 GRE issues were logged during April 2011 and the top 4 categories relate to software (8), user account (4), purchase 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. 5 SLT issues were logged during April 2011 and these relate to software (3), hardware and VLE (1 each) enquiries or problems.
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).
We are progressing the Windows 7 deployment throughout the college, with CAHId (staff), MMB (all but 1 group) complete; SLT to be done during the summer break and GRE to be completed by end Q2 2011. We now include Adobe Acrobat and Creative Suite 5 on the system image to speed up the migration of each machine.
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 (netbook, tablet, etc) would be useful.
