Iowa State University IT

CCSG Meeting Notes - March 25, 2008


Dan Carlile, moderating
J. Balvanz, recording

Dan was surprised at the number of people who came given the limited agenda. He was gone for spring break. In Oklahoma it's 70 degrees, and when driving back to Iowa it was a bit of a shock to find snow on the ground.

Dan wants to encourage the group to contribute topics; we've been a little short lately. We will do some discussion on the Towers Perrin report in April.

Announcements:

  1. Dell representative Kirk A. will be here on 3/26/2008 doing a hardware roadmap discussion from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in 206 Durham Center.
  2. Open forum on the compensation study 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. in 2055 Hoover; listen and hear people who worked on the report.
  3. On April 4, 2008 at 3:45-5:00 PM in Garden Room of the Gateway Hotel on University Blvd., there will be another discussion of the compensation study.
  4. Dan has the new license codes for XWin-32 and will send those out after this meeting; it's starting to complain that the license will expire soon.

  5. The MATLAB licensing server for faculty and staff use is getting really old and we have put up a replacement. You should change your license file (license.dat) to look for license-1.iastate.edu, the new server. (It currently says license.ait.iastate.edu, which we're trying to decommission.) Most labs have been moved to the new server, and we're starting to contact individuals. We have a goal to get everyone to the new server and bring the old one down sometime after the end of this semester. Encourage people to move before them, it's an easy change.

    Jim Wellman said it's worth mentioning that the student MATLAB license and Maple site license will probably not be renewed. Maple will continue to work without upgrades; we can continue to use it until something breaks, but we won't have access to upgrades. The dean will decide on May 15 whether or not to renew the student MATLAB license.

John Rose: RHEL renewal

John's here to beg. Every year we buy a campus site subscription for all machines on campus. The cost is a function of the FTE count. This year that went up to 1100, and they've also increased the rate from $7/FTE to $9/FTE. The cost will be somewhere between 8.55 and 9.00/FTE, so we will need up to $9900 for that site license. We pass the hat for that, and we'll be making that appeal in the next few weeks.

There are about 2000 systems scattered around campus. So far people have been volunteering enough money to cover the subscription. It covers server and workstation licenses, all updates. Engineering and Central IT have taken up a lot of this cost, plus some people from Ag and other areas.

Feel free to send Dan money if you wish to contribute. We'll hear more about this as we get ready to do the renewals, and contributions are welcome.

New business:

Web Wilke asked what people were using Linux for.

People gave some examples:

RHEL is designed primarily for servers for which you need long-term support (seven years support on a given version). If a server works with a particular version, you still get updates for 7 years and don't have to upgrade all the time to get current security updates.

You (and your students) can also use RHEL on your personal machines as well, with full support at no additional cost.

We've also taught a series of Unix system administration courses and they're still quite popular. [We're getting into the meaty part of the sequence right now.]

Dan suggested that we do a presentation on RHEL for the next meeting.

Q: Have the Iowa State custom channels been fixed?
A: Yes
Q: Will you ever get the documentation on linux.iastate.edu fixed?
A: Yeah, that was originally done by Joe Mesterhazy and he's gone; Dave Edsall volunteered to fix that and hasn't gotten it done either. (He apologized.) Dan mentioned that people could volunteer to assist with this.

Q (from Jim Wellman): Are there Vista training opportunities coming in the future?
A: The original Vista group did some exploration on bringing Vista training to campus. We did bring some free stuff to campus, which was worth almost what we paid for it, and we didn't really do anything to go beyond that. Dan will look into revisiting that, since Vista's hanging over everybody's heads. Extension has a lot of installations; KMS has about 700 systems registered. This will probably increase in the next few months. We've made no move to push ITS-supported clients to Vista; new machines coming in are currently getting back-leveled to XP.

Frank reported that several schools say Vista Service Pack 1 is still too buggy to implement. We are not blocking Vista SP1 on the WSUS servers; our stance is that service packs will be released as soon as Microsoft thinks it's ready and releases it. We've only held back one service pack in history: XP SP2, which came about this time of year. It installed and activated the SP2 firewall by default. That had a high disruptive potential, so we held it back until a better time in the school year.

Steve and Beata have had good experiences with Vista SP1 and no serious problems, so we're going to release. XP SP3 also doesn't seem to implement any major changes, so we'll let it go as well. It could show up as early as today.

So far XP is still scheduled to continue support for several years, and XP will be available for purchase until next year.

Don't ask for the "Vista Deployment Workshop"; that was the one we had before, and it was sort of a waste of time. Dan will look into some other training opportunities.

Q (from Jess Robinson): Microsoft license server license renewals?
Dan: I need to get that done, was supposed to have a conference call with the people in California but it got put off.

Q (from Dan Carlile): Is anyone interested in 64-bit AutoCAD? I've only had a couple of requests; got an answer out of John Olson today and he said that any products in the ADI suite that have a 64-bit counterpart, they are also included. We don't have the media kit, but when that arrives we will make that available.

Q: What about Mathematica?
A: That's an interesting deal. We get overtures from faculty members who are interested. A site license is about $25,000 for a school the size of ours; they've been here promoting, but no one wants to put up the cash. Math has about 14 seats in a license, physics has their own license server, and there are some individuals with copies, but most departments don't seem to care enough to put up the money for a site license. Maple, which is comparable to Mathematica in some ways, can't find enough users to justify a site license either. Dan would be glad to facilitate meetings with Wolfram if there's sufficient interest.

Next meeting: April 22, 2008 at 2 PM in 206 Durham Center.

Adjourned at 2:54 p.m.