August 2015 Meeting

In attendance: William Dougherty, NI&S-scribe and chair; Richard Quintin-DBAA; Jean Plymale-CTSSR; Wanda Baber-SS/SMT; Brain Long-SETI-QA; Jeff Kidd-CNS PR; Brian Jones-CNS; Mike Moyer-DCM; Kevin Davis-UCS; Susan Brooker-Gross-IT Communications. 

TLOS: 

TLOS was originally planning to do the last major code upgrade of Scholar this Saturday (08-15) which would be the full out 2 to 3 hour process of deploying the code and making any necessary changes to the Oracle database Scholar uses. The purpose of this large change was to deploy some very custom tools into the Sakai core which easily allow faculty to simply click a few links and their courses are moved over to our Next Generation LMS, canvas. The tools were written at other Universities and require customization for our use here at Virginia Tech, and in collaboration with Instructure, the vendor of canvas, it was decided that the code update being done this week was too risky given that exams will be going on. So this maintenance has been postponed until mid to late September well after the next SAMS meeting at which point I will have more details to share.

Hopefully the migration will go smoothly since these tools are a little more refined than when we endured the migration from Blackboard to Sakai. The learning curve and support load should also be much lower since OLCS is writing up detailed instructions and all support calls will be handled by Instructure.

Questions to Bill or Brian Broniak.

DCM: 

There is a generator test scheduled for this Sunday, August 16th (it's on the SAMS calendar).

Google Groups: 

All listserv lists will be forwarded to their Google Group counterparts today at noon with some exceptions; bulk loaded lists or ones that experienced issues in the first round will still wait for a third round of transfers. Class lists will be handled differently and have frequent refreshes during drop/add period, then less frequent refreshes after that. 

SETI QA: 

New DAT will be functionally complete in PreProd this month, so testing will begin next month. 

DUO will be engaged with 3 apps in Production by 9/21/15; Splunk is among them. Test cases and device types are being solicited by the implementation group. Desire is to see as many different types of devices as possible in PreProd. 

CNS: 

Border NAT installation for private addressing. Detailed info below: 

Effective August 1, 2015, and over the following two weeks, network address translation (NAT) services will move to our campus network borders to address the increased need for private addressing.

The continuing rapid growth of the number of devices (laptops, mobile devices, sensors) connecting to Virginia Tech's network increases the demand for IPv4 private addresses (RFC-1918). The resultant exhaustion of IPv4 addresses necessitates the use of internal private addressing which requires network address translation. The university has previously used NAT for wireless networks, performing the translations before routing the traffic to the campus networks.  As a result, only IPv4 traffic leaving the campus network will be translated. On-campus hosts and servers will see traffic sourced from these private addresses. 

System administrators are encouraged to review and adjust their IPv4 firewall strategy for their services, accordingly.  

This only applies to IPv4 connections.  IPv6 connections are not subject to address translations.

The private IPv4 addresses currently comprise the subnet:  172.16.0.0/12

Breakdown of individual services by subnet

Additional information is available on the computing.vt.edu website--search for IP addresses.

Hardware failure at 5:50pm on 08/11/15 took out northern internet connection; failover to southern route did work. Some affect on NoVA data service, and IPv6 routing was also affected locally. Illustrated where additional work is needed. All services restored by 8:04pm. 

MLX1 and 2 were fully upgraded this morning. MLX3 upgrade will be performed on Friday, August 14th. 

IT Mgmt: 

Fall IT reference guide is now a blog and online; available from the IT home page. 

UCS: 

Fall rush is imminent; Please don't break anything!