FTC meeting, Nov. 18, 2014

Presenters: Scott Cann, Barry Schaudt

Happenings: B. Schaudt provided a corkscrew from his Swiss Army Knife to wide admiration.

ITS notes

I. Strategic Plan – S. Cann presenting. Ongoing discussions have been fruitful. Plan for a retreat on Newton Campus to work on revisions of Plan in December. Offered thanks to FTCs for contribution.

2. Activation infrastructure - upgrade, preparation for IPv6. Implications for everyone, but not a big deal for accessing IP addresses. Facilities has a major headache updating IP addresses for equipment. Everything is being replaced wholesale. IPv4 is outdated – especially from Europe – current numbers too limited. IPv6 has longer addresses. New devices do not support the IPv4 system. Summer, 2015?

Scott will return to FTCs for implementation, our input and details. [See January, 2015 meeting notes for up-to-date information.]

3. Student systems. EagleApps. Kuali.com student system planning projects – the consortium had been building our own. Kuali Foundation has decided on a “for profit” wing. Mike Bourque – two bad options – 1 - homegrown or 2 – People Soft/Oracle. So we decided to join Kuali for “vapor wear” (announced, but not yet real or never to exist software). Making a recommendation to the board of trustees on this in two weeks. What we now have in Kuali is open source – can we continue to try to develop homegrown. We could continue to build – we do have the capacity?

G. Wyner question: Koali=Linux; Red Hat? S. Cann – problem is that other schools are bailing. Degradation of open source collaborative institution model. Question 2 – other schools are thinking they need to get out. Why do they think they need to leave the consortium? S. Hesse-Biber follow-up question – have we talked with other institutions? Suggests banding together with others. S. Cann – “mentality is collegial”, but every institutions politics differ from every other. Indiana U, for example, has an active state legislature involved. UC Berkeley, too. Surrounded by allies, but one remains on one’s own. Some of the leaving entities had committed to specialized parts which they are dropping. Much depends on the “for profit” part of Kuali.

G. Wyner – Sakai Project is going well (another open source consortium, more than 40 institutions developed Sakai 10) suggesting that Kuali may still be viable.

S. Hesse-Bible question. Dropped institutions may be an advantage. This gives us an opportunity?

4. OS X Yosemite Upgrade. “Bricked”, IT has discovered the workaround. We could pull the offending file using Alteris. Push out fix to Yosemite. Every machine is bound to active directory where the file is located. Search file with preloaded BC information.

But, IT is not formally recommending Yosemite. Sofos seems to work, but many software elements have not yet been certified. Nor is the use of Altiris kosher as yet.

K. Baum – using Alteris to push out correction to all machines would seem doable. George Wyner - problems might be created in Active Directory. Scott suspects we are not missing anything – low need for Active Directory.

Do FTCs authorize the use of Alteris in this one instance? This does not make a precedent. M.Connolly motion – authorize use of Alteris for this one fix. Two “no” votes. Objection is that this is the thin edge of the wedge. Scott – slippery slope recognized; IT staff came to Scott and requested that he raise this concern with the faculty.

“Bricking” far greater problem with Yosemite than breach of protocol about Alteris. One could lose data.

G. Wyner suggested this is like a virus that could be removed in the same way by Sofos?

Discussion of single use of Altiris: Email notification, C. O’Connor? “Opt out” type email so that inaction is assent. Sense of meeting is a “qualified yes”. S. Canno’s takeaway was a sense of many reservations about this precedent.

OS X.X.12 update (of Yosemite) – okay for those who already have Yosemite. Mavericks from BCCR machines are the problem; non-BCCR machines may not have the same problem? Barry Schaudt reports that there is troubled there, too.

Bricking only is a problem with BCCR machines and only these will be fixed using Alteris.

M. Connolly – Maverick and Yosemite can be partitioned on your system to keep both, preserving some Maverick-based features intact while allowing iPhone, etc. that require Yosemite.

Final word – get this back to colleagues. The default remains to warn folks not to upgrade to Yosemite, not yet.

Adjourned at 6 pm. Notes prepared and posted by T. Duket.