In attendance: Dave Adams, Bill DeWindt, Bill Dooley, Nate Smith, Brian Jones, Lylah Shelor, Susan Brooker-Gross, Karen Herrington, Kim Homer. Chair and Scribe: William Dougherty

  • Learning Technologies will be making some minor network and server changes over Spring Break. We will be enabling a redundant load balancer early in the week (i.e., before the SAMS meeting/still in process), and we will be moving the Online Course Evaluation application from physical hardware to a virtual machine around midweek.
    • We do not expect any outage from either of these changes. In the worst case, if we run into an unexpected problem, users might experience short (less than a minute) interruptions in service during a very low usage period.-Dave Adams-LT
  • SETI: Middleware is upgrading OpenLDAP to 2.4 on March 7th. That went fine. 
    • Cert issues from Middleware for outside entities.CA service had to change to accommodate a cert needed by Health and Safety. E-Prov took the CA down without informing Kim so she could inform the group. Users didn't notice, but Kim noticed and reported it. A load balancer issue actually impacted the service more than the change. Need to work on notifications from that group. -Kim Homer-SETI
  • We will have some routine network code upgrades. We also have many building equipment upgrades that we are scheduling over the next few months before Fall classes.Trying to remove older Cisco switches (model 1900s) (problems with shipments; took three tries to get undamaged equipment). This will mostly be academic/administrative bldgs/dorms were done last summer.
    • The largest impact project will be upgrading code on the MLX router/switches in the machine room March 11th. Lylah provided a contact list of all the stakeholders in the machine room with servers attached to MLX ports to get this message out. This particular upgrade will require not one but two reloads of the equipment and may cause consternation for some of the hosts attached to these MLX ports. We want this to be a tightly coordinated effort between CNS and the consumers of the MLX ports. This will take us a step closer to upgrades that don't require outages, but there will still be some impacts (Brocade now owns Foundry).
    • Wireless controllers are still being worked on by Steve Lee and Cisco. Fixes being added, have been over the last 4 weeks. Upgrading wireless drivers on NICs, especially Windows/Intel based equipment, may help quite a bit. MACs being affected more for some reason. Send info to Steve/Brian on circumstances when problems are encountered.
    • Torgersen will be upgraded between now and the end of April; routing changes as well.  -Brian Jones -NEO
  • The banner databases, related web applications, and CAS will be unavailable from 6am – 6:30am on Sunday, March 14 due to maintenance to the databases. We will be applying an Oracle security patch during the outage. In addition CMS will be unavailable from 6am – 7am on the same day for the same reason. The notification below was distributed earlier this week:
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________
    Due to maintenance the following databases will be unavailable on
    Sunday, 14 March 2010 from 6am to 6:30am while an Oracle security patch is applied:
    banner
    vtfbanner
    registry
    vatech
    gis
    CMS (6am – 7am)
    During this maintenance the following production web applications
    will be unavailable:
    AIS Application Promotion (AAP)
    Automated Request Process (ARP)
    Budget Tuition web forms
    CAS Authentication
    GIS
    Harvest code repository
    Internet Native Banner
    IRM Password Change Application
    Leave Entry And Reporting System
    Make A Gift Today (University Development)
    Network Software Server (network.software.vt.edu)
    Self-Service Banner (Hokie Spa, Hokie Plus, Hokie Team)
    Shibboleth
    Timetable Of Classes
    CMS (6am – 7am)
    -Bill Dooley-DBAA
  • Next month a level 2 PM has been scheduled on April 21st on generators, so no generator availability. On the 22nd the load bank for the research side will be tested and therefore down; and on the 23rd the smaller generator. This is routine maintenance. -Lylah Shelor
  • In May (05/15/10) a major Scholar upgrade will be performed and in August (probably week of the 16th) BlackBoard will be shutdown. -Dave Adams