Agenda for the meeting
- Status of various builds on top of base- Brian and Jon
- Concerns about Applications Data Folder and Mirroring – Lisa and Jon
- Licensing update – Patrick or Jon
- Download server update
- Timeline for moving things project forward
Attending:
- Jon
- Brian
- Blake
- Patrick
- Lisa
Heather had communicated she had a prior commitment and was unable to attend.
Action Items:
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Task List
Status of various builds on top of base- Brian and Jon
Student build based on base is proceeding. One learning is that it takes a lot of time to install everything 4-8 hours minimum, so we need to decide how we are going to rev versions for semester (or other periodic basis) updates. Probably makes sense to make the same changes as are made to the base for several revisions and then on a longer term reset with a new base.
SWRT agreed to document step by step all changes made to the base so they could be replicated on the subsequent VM builds.
Admin staff build - Brian apologized for not being farther along. He has finally freed up some time to work on this and other projects. Brian has spoken with Mike from ITSS and under the covers, security for Win7 has not changed significantly from XP, so we can use the same security policy as created for the Dell image. Brian will get this to Blake by Friday.
Concerns about application data and mirroring
Lisa shared concerns that the help desk has of users storing email in the AppData folder (i.e. default location where Outlook stores PST files). We agreed to leverage the Group Policy setting to only allow OST files (Exchange) and that while people can go and change the registry to undo this, that is reasonable acceptance of the risk.
Jon has been unable to get mirroring working with a Windows host in VMware Workstation. This appears to be a Mac only feature. Blake and Patrick believe this should still work, but will require hand manipulation of the VMX (VM configuration file) to get the correct host paths working. Blake will explore this. Lisa's preference is to provide separate VM downloads for the different configurations for Admin Staff and Student VMs. We are not using Mirroring on the base for security concerns. Jon is concerned that we will need to document how to switch it because students will want to use the VM from multiple platforms and is concerned about the server storage space for additional 10GB distributions.
Licensing Update
Jon and Patrick were on a conference call with MIT's new Microsoft Rep who confirmed that any machine covered under the Upgrade license of the MSCA is entitled to run up to four Windows VMs on it. White box machines (ones that never had a Windows or Mac OS license purchased with them) are not eligible under the MSCA and are thus not eligible to run these VMs. We will need to notify the users as we do with the MSCA distribution, but do not need to require additional tracking of the VM downloads or count that to the limits in place for student downloads of Windows media under the MSCA.
Download Server Update
Thanks to OIS, we have a working large file download server that we can leverage to deploy the VMs. https://downlaods.mit.edu/ 
; We can leverage access limitations using MIT Certificates based on the standard user, group, or MIT and the new feature is also to be able to limit access based on affiliation: student, staff (including faculty) and affiliate. Patrick and Jon have the details on configuring this, but it is very similar to the standard .htaccess.mit configuration.
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