Present: othomas, jmhunt, jdreed, tjsmith, jogomes, jtguy, ranjani, alexp (facilitator)

1. Goals

  • Individual (all)
    • Oliver has received these from almost everyone; should all be in by this Friday
    • Will post them on the wiki
    • Some individual goals seem appropriate as team goals (i.e. cross-training)
    • Trying to fit into structure IS&T - CSS - FSX Team goals
    • Some CSS goals are broad and non-specific at this point
    • Will try to get first cut out by next week
  • Team (all)
    • We should try to get these firmed up by mid-Sept, in time to get in briefing book for Marilyn Smith
    • Some externally imposed (Athena cluster use work with DUE, student printing)
    • Oliver thinking about org chart, working on a draft; we should discuss next week:
      1. hardware and spaces
        • labs, Athena clusters
        • kiosk machines
        • machines supporting teaching (podium machines, Eclassrooms)
      2. software
      3. academic services
    • We may have more boxes than people- some may need to be in multiple places
    • Podium machine list is frequently out of date; we should be the canonical information source, but not until we're able to take this on

action item: team should discuss this at next meeting

2. Update IS&T printing documentation (jmhunt)

  • Docs are moving to new look-and-feel but there are inconsistencies (reference to Klpr use)
  • FSX owns student printing now
  • Kerberized printing being turned off in dorms
  • Printing is a moving target- 3 solutions now exist for Windows and Mac CUPS printing. Should stabilize over Fall
  • We should revise cluster printing docs
  • There are also Institute-wide task forces dealing with printing
  • Athena printing will continue to work as documented
  • We should start an FSX printing subteam to:
    • review current documents
    • check consistency
    • make recommendations
    • focus primarily on Windows and Mac printing, lesser priority on Linux

action item: jmhunt will enter this as a project on the wiki project page

3. Athena metrics

  • update from release-team (alexp, jdreed)
    • Some information we have now is not getting to the right place
    • jdreed will rework Athena wiki space to be more informative about how Athena is being used now ("tell the story", "what are students doing"), also metrics by category (Email, Web, Office software, Academic software, Other)
    • Metrics will be from machine logs, report scripts written by release-team
    • Will not include apps run out of AFS
    • Reporting scripts will be run by ops, who can Email weekly reports
    • Should be able to distinguish usage by unique users
    • Target date- end of September
    • Oliver notes we're counting a variety of discrete things- data is hard to integrate; he will do a mockup of the kinds of information we'd like to see
  • keypad/card swipe cluster entry monitor (tjsmith, jguy)
    • We have no counts of learning space usage- we'd like to get door entry counts
    • We should try MIT card reader on door; should not be alarmed to CP, but should sound alarm if door open too long
    • Can all eligible users get a card? Hardest part is guests, should be solvable
    • Another hurdle is cost- could do pilot in single cluster
    • No significant concern for single swipe getting multiple users in, but we want to monitor at times when occupancy is low or zero (theft deterrence)
    • Correlating door open counts with usage logs can help assess usage modes

action items: jtguy will try to determine cost of putting reader om W20 door, othomas and jdreed will make list of parties we should check with

4. Athena license poaching (alexp)

  • A significant fraction of concurrent use Athena software launches is from unauthorized launches on non-Athena MIT machines
  • Vendors usually don't care, and it's generally not a license violation though many software licenses are unclear on this
  • Should not be our job to police, but it would be advisable to get legal take on what our rights and risks are; confer with paheff at some point
  • For now we should try to get statistics on this, enhance ability to determine how software is being used

action items: alexp will discuss logging options offline with othomas; jdreed has ideas for combining this with general Athena statistics collection

Roundtable:

othomas: firming up team goals, role descriptions, org chart by 9/21/09
jmhunt: working on deployment of IE-night watchman and wakeup with OIS; need to confirm that it works with TSM backup
jdreed: orientation getting in high gear; working with peloquin on this; quickstations can be installed now, will get list of HP quickstations to prepare for replacement
tjsmith, jogomes: deployed 2 news Dells in Bldg 54; replacing broken, stolen hardware in clusters
jtguy: problem in Simmons with stolen and broken hardware
ranjani: working on campus google map overlays, Wiki project on geographic network connectivity issues from last week, structuring EdTech page (team should submit updates)

Next facilitator: jwl on 9/8/09 (no meeting next week)

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