ICC Meeting:

IFAS COMPUTER COORDINATORS
(ICC)

NOTES FROM Sept 10th 2004       REGULAR MEETING

A regular meeting of the ICC was held on Friday, September 10th, 2004. The meeting was chaired and called to order by Steve Lasley, at approx. 10:00 a.m. in the ICS Conference Room.

PRESENT: Fifteen members participated. Remote participants: David Ayers, Nancy Johnson, Joel Parlin and Josh Wilson. On-site participants: David Bauldree, Dennis Brown, Marcus Cathey, Dan Cromer, Kevin Hill, Chris Hughes, Jack Kramer, Winnie Lante, Steve Lasley, Richard Phelan, and Mark Ross.

STREAMING AUDIO: available here.

NOTES:

Agendas were distributed and the meeting was called to order by Steve Lasley at 10am. There were two new ICC members to introduce, although neither were present. Gary Thompson of IFAS/IT Business Software is a recent addition to our group, although he has been with IFAS for some time. Also, Christopher Hehn of Food and Resource Economics is also a new member. Christopher provides desktop support as well as web development for that department under the supervision of Brian Sevier.

Kevin Hill, Chairman of the ICC AD sub-committee, gave a brief report on the previous day's ICC-AD subcommittee meeting. Kevin reported that we had a good meeting that basically brought us up-to-date on where we were with regard to SID history user migrations from IFASDOM into UFAD. That went very well and is now completed. For the most part, everything is on target. Training is one item that has had to be dropped due to time considerations, but Chris Hughes will make himself available to answer any questions people may have in this regard. Cabinets for the remote DCs are going to be shipped shortly to the various remote RECs and CEOs. This will allow county staff to get those installed and ready for district support folks to setup the DCs down the road. For those of you who do not have a management station ready for connection to UFAD, Chris Hughes has set up five machine in the AD training lab at the Livestock Pavilion to which you may connect via remote desktop for testing: IF-LSP-LAB01.ad.ufl.edu, IF-LSP-LAB02.ad.ufl.edu, IF-LSP-LAB03.ad.ufl.edu, IF-LSP-LAB04.ad.ufl.edu and IF-LSP-LAB05.ad.ufl.edu. This would allow you to test GPOs or scripts prior to your unit's migration to AD. If you need assistance with doing that, please contact Chris Hughes.

Chris Hughes, IFAS IT Active Directory Lead, reported that he is trying hard to keep on schedule. He expects to get caught up this weekend in preparation for Monday's migration of Environmental Horticulture and Hort Science on Thursday.

Because streaming was not available and we furthermore have lost Jenny as note taker for the ICC-AD meetings, Kevin plans to write up some notes on that meeting for those who had been trying to participate remotedly.

Chris Leopold wasn't available to provide an update on the videoconferencing project, but Dan Cromer spoke briefly to that. We have had two weeks of classes, although the hurricane knocked the lines out and interferred with some of that. There were some complaints about the quality at Ft. Pierce, but it seems the primary source of that was pre-existing problems with microphone placement in their auditorium. In general the system is up and running. The remaining issue is getting standard H.239 protocol drivers for the Polycoms so they can work in conjunction with the Radvision concentration point to provide dual media streams. H.239 introduces the concept of 'data-showing', whereby PC desktop graphics are converted into a separate media stream and transmitted in parallel with the video stream. This allows sharing Powerpoint presentation slides at the same time as the videoconferencing. Training is an issue that is going to be address. Dan would like the ICC members to coordinate with their media specialists to assist in the technical details of DE delivery.

Jack Kramer stated that he considers the new network connection at the RECs that are involved in the DE project to be a giant step backward in terms of the ability of local staff to control their own network. Kevin Hill agreed. Dan Cromer responded that there is a new networking model such that CNS controls the routers and is the primary point of contact for any network problems. Dan agreed that loss of local control may indeed be a problem; he stated, however, that we need to work within the current system to demonstrate the need for that. This can best be accomplished by reporting all problems and issues to CNS (392-2061). It is through this method that the needs of remote sites can be communicated. For those requiring traffic information, you may request reports be prepared for your perusal. Mike Armstrong, apparently, is the sole remote admin with access to their router.

There was a discussion on how we might make sure that streaming is available and recorded for all our meetings. One option may be to somehow get the Polycom audio portion streamed additionally to the media server so we don't duplicate that effort. This would mean needing a good Polycom audio stream, however, and that has not always been the case; streaming audio from Microsoft Media Server has traditionally been the best for us. Another option may be to give others within the ICC (perhaps the chair and vice-chair) the capability of streaming from laptops which they may have. That would allow them to cover those instances when ITNS staff might be unavailable to perform that function. Mark Ross requested that the process be documented so that others could setup the client and do the streaming; this would require proper access be set on the server side, however.

Jenny Brewer is leaving ITAS for a development position in Sarasota. Her last day is September 17th and we all regret seeing her go. Jenny is currently on vacation in Washington DC; we all hope to have the opportunity to say goodbye in person before she leaves.

Dwight Jesseman was away for Veritas training, but he had left a number of Visio diagrams concerning the upcoming migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. This is currently scheduled for October 1-3. The previously scheduled database defrag is being scrapped to save some time. Wildlife will be migrating September 21st as a test in preparation for moving the rest. Initially, IFAS we be providing both the front-end and back-end servers. UFAD intends to provide front-end services, but those will not be ready in time for our migration. IFAS may consider moving our front-end to UFAD at some later date. IFAS email addresses will remain unchanged in all this, but access to that email will be controlled via the Gatorlink credentials. If anyone wishes the Visio diagrams, please email Steve Lasley and he will forward them; Dwight wants to make sure these are not widely distributed.

With Jenny leaving, Dwight will be taking on the anit-SPAM responsibilities until she can be replaced.

Regarding WinXP SP2, Steve Lasley said he had created a document describing steps for users to take in preparation for this upgrade, including removing spyware and upgrading the BIOS. Once done, Steve decided that this was too complex for most and he has decided to do all those upgrades himself, a couple each day until done. That said, he has not had any problems--something which Mark Ross remarked on as well. The firewall is being disabled via logon script, so that shouldn't be a problem. Once in UFAD, we will be able to use GPOs to control the firewall settings in an active stance. Kevin wondered if there was anyway to control this prior to the migration. Chris Hughes mentioned that setting could be controlled at the time of SP2 installation via an ".inf" configuration file. This would require some coordination to assure settings didn't break anything (ePolicy, etc.).

Chris Hughes reported that John Sawyer has been assigned the ePO upgrade task and will likely report on that as it becomes ready; in the meantime, ePO consoles are generally not working. John has the new McAfee VirusScan 8.0 client available for anyone wishing to test it. Steve reported that he thought it has made the single machine one which he had installed it a bit sluggish, but Mark Ross indicated that he had seen no problems. Joel Parlin said the only problem he has seen is that he could not connect to the console on the remote machines. He can connect to the event viewer. He is wondering if it is one of the port blocking options that is responsible.

Steve Lasley mentioned that he had requested that the PatchLink agent be installed to his machines via logon script, but that this was yet to happen. In the meantime, Steve is installing it by hand on machines as the opportunity arises. He wants, at minumum, to use it to monitor how well the currently enabled automatic update downloads are being applied by his people.

Dan Cromer replied to a question of Jack Kramer's by saying that EDIS is now configured so that unit heads must approve document submissions. Petraq Papajorgji has to convert the EDIS system, however, to use the GLIDs.

Steve briefly ran down the upcoming AD migration milestones:

Monday, September 13, 2004	ENVHORT Migration
Tuesday, September 14, 2004	ENVHORT Migration - Cleanup
Wednesday, September 15, 2004	Problem Cleanup
Thursday, September 16, 2004	Hort Migration
Friday, September 17, 2004	Hort Migration - Problem Cleanup
Saturday, September 18, 2004	Problem Cleanup
Monday, September 20, 2004	IFAS_WILDLIFE Migration
Tuesday, September 21, 2004	IFAS_WILDLIFE Migration - Problem Cleanup
Wednesday, September 22, 2004	Problem Cleanup
Thursday, September 23, 2004	Prepare for IFASDOM On-campus migration
Friday, September 24, 2004	Prepare for IFASDOM On-campus migration
Monday, September 27, 2004	IFASDOM On-campus Migration
Tuesday, September 28, 2004	IFASDOM On-campus Migration
Wednesday, September 29, 2004	IFASDOM On-campus Migration
Thursday, September 30, 2004	IFASDOM On-campus Migration
Friday, October 01, 2004	Exchange Migration
Saturday, October 02, 2004	Exchange Migration
Sunday, October 03, 200	Exchange Migration
Monday, October 04, 2004	FPO Migration
Tuesday, October 05, 2004	FPO Migration
Thursday, October 07, 2004	ENTNEM Migration
Friday, October 08, 2004	ENTNEM Migration

Chris Hughes reported from George Bryan that course groups went live today in UFAD. There are 9,056 plus groups with more than 199,000 individual entries!

The change to UFAD for DHCP and WINS should happen later today. A push/pull relationship will be configured so that there will be no need to make the changes to your statically set machines at a specific point in time. All are encouraged to make those changes, however, as soon as Dwight announces that this has been done. One of the concerns was that this be in place by Monday so migration can begin for Environmental Hort.

Mark Ross mentioned that his is running DHCP locally and was wondering if that was going to be pulled back centrally. Chris said this will be done eventually, but that it is not high priority.

Jack Kramer mentioned having a problem with a "missing dll" message with Win98 (pre-SE) regarding the AD client installs. Chris referred him to Marshall Pierce, who apparently had an answer on that issue.

Dan Cromer asked for continuing help in determining when and how to send out the next AD advisory to IFAS-ALL and what that should entail.

The use of Deep Matrix for web statistics on IFAS websites was mentioned in passing--something of which some ICC members may not be aware. If you want webstats on a site hosted by IFAS, you can make the request via http://itsa.ifas.ufl.edu/account/ so that can be enabled. Once you hear back that this has been done (you will be given access credentials at that time), you can go to http:webstats.ifas.ufl.edu to view those.

Chris Hughes could use some help in setting the Network Managed by fields for a long list of departed users. Please contact him via email if you can help with that. To do this, you will need to have your DSA apply the "UF_N_DIR_ADD_PERSON" and "UF_N_DIR_RELATE_PERSON" roles to your Gatorlink account.

Jack Kramer related that Larry Treadaway has a great set of hurricane links on the FAWN site.

Things deteriorated from there :-). The meeting adjourned early at about 11:35am, as the agenda had been exhausted without further new discussion.