Date: 2015 Oct 21 2:30-3:30PM.
Attendees: G. Oakham, D. Rogers, T. Xu, R. Thomson
W. Hong, M. Hu, S. Wang
1. Review minutes and approval
Michael asked that the minute of Sept 23rd can be approved as listed on physical website if there are no objections.
2. Common IT issues Discussion and Follow-up
Michael updated Physics website broken links have been fixed mostly by Yeremia. Gerald asked if any timeline to rebuild physics website. Wade said it will be in couple of months for physics website re-building since Yeremia is too busy now. Wade also indicated the broken links is hard to avoid since the links referenced on our sites are out of our control--- we never get notification when the source got changes. Dave said it should be removed if the reference links are broken. Wade said the challenge is there is no dedicate committee to go through all website. Michael said he downloaded and run the open source Python tool(LinkChecker) to scan most faculty homepages and didn’t find any broken links on personal home pages. Also, Michael said he is learning Python to write scripts to check broken links, hopefully he can work on this after he complete the new mail server setup.
Michael updated the Copyright infringement notice email has sent to physics-all. Dave inquired what kind of file of the 300M file in trouble. Wade said it could be portion of movie or low-quality small movie or game.
Data server (Ngoma) was down for more than week. Michael stated the reason is zfs tank usage is almost 98%, which cause nfs issue. After Wade and Michael to move data to another location and compress some data area (ex: atlas ROOT data, which can release 10% free disk space by compression), Ngoma’s all zfs tank disk usage has been lowdown to 65%. It is running stably after it is back online.
3. Ever-green Project Discussion.
Michael said both Atlas and CLRP(egs) groups expressed interests to contribution to Ever-Green research project. Also Wade indicated he might have big purchase plan from Faculty of Science, but it will not be going to happen before next February. Michael said it will be good idea to make a single purchase together with Wade’s purchase. Gerald indicated the order should be placed by end of next February.
4. IT Infrastructure Changes
Michael proposed building new mail server since current mail server are running issues. He listed running applications on current mail server and new version application on new mail server. The current application most versions are 10 years old. Michael also pointed two major difference between current mail server and new mail servers are mail format (Mbox: current mail format, all messages are stored in one single file; Maildir: new mail format, 3 sub-folders, each single message will be an unique file) and IMAP server(UW Imap: current IMAP server, Dovecot: new IMAP server). He presented sides to show difference between Mbox and Maildir, and indicated Dovecot can handle both Mbox and Maildir. Gerald asked how the new mail server compatible with current mail messages. Dave asked if pine will be supported by new mail server. Wade draw high level mail architecture diagram to show the mail flow on current mail system and new mail system and how the new mail system compatible with current data. Michael answered Dave question that Alpine will be replacement of pine, and he will setup test box to run Alpine to see how it works with new mail system. Wade asked Michael to setup virtual machine for new mail system, and should be ready to migration before next meeting. Michael promised he will do it as soon as possible he can.
5. AOB
No AOB.
6. Proposal next meeting
Since the meeting is monthly base, Michael said he would setup doodle to schedule next computer meeting.