Iowa State University IT

Computer Consulting and Support Group Meeting Notes - May 27, 2008

Dan Carlile, moderator
J. Balvanz, recording

1. Welcome and Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the following contributors to today's meeting:
Clyciane Michelini, CTLT (suggested iTunes topic); Steve Heideman (ChemBioDraw), Chemistry; Jennifer Lohrbach (IPX sunset), Jim Twetten (iTunes and classroom capture), and Kent Ziebell (spam blocking), ITS.

2. Announcements:

a. Spam blocking update -- Kent Ziebell, ITS

IT Services is on the path to block incoming email that Sophos PureMessage rates at a probability of being spam of 99 percent or greater. An email to this effect was sent out to CCSG on Friday. This is still a proposal although we're on course to do this on June 16. The CIO office is still looking for feedback but this will probably happen because it needs to, badly.

We have done greylisting so far, which has reduced our spam by more than 2 million pieces of email per day. We are still getting 3 million messages through the greylisting system, and 1.3 million of those messages are tagged at 99 percent probability or higher. On June 16, we will start to reject these messages. The last phishing wave would have been completely blocked had we done that. This would also block most of worst of the porn spam, most of that is also greater than 99 percent probability.

Of course, this is not a panacea. We'll still get some phishing mail but this is a good starting point. It will reduce the incoming email by 1.3 million messages per week, reducing load on ITS and departmental servers.

We do tagging and graylisting at the MX record servers, but for those who forward email off-campus, that forwarding is being handled at the POP servers. Not redirecting that traffic will help prevent our POP servers from being blacklisted.

The only thing that might be a problem is that if we have ISPs serving people outside ISU who are routinely blacklisted, we may have to provide for whitelisting them.

There will be opt-out by username (just like greylisting) and you will also be able to opt-out mailing lists (though your members may not be happy if you do so). People who are currently opting out on greylists will be automatically put on the opt-out for the 99 percent block.

Q: If you have reservations about this, who should you contact?
A: Send mail to Kent (ziebell@iastate.edu) and he will forward it to the CIO.

Q: The Outlook junk filter often gives false positives, and some are concerned that their "good" mail will be blocked.
A: Our experience is that PureMessage does a better job, and at the 99 percent level it's pretty reliable.

Comment: The Grad college switched to using PerlMX-based filters, and we have only seen one false positive in the last month.

Q: Is anyone hearing from faculty worried about this?
A: Right now the Solution Center is still seeing mostly issues related to the Kerberos change; no one has had time to think about this yet.

b. ChemBioDraw Ultra site license -- Steve Heideman, Chemistry

ChemBioDraw Ultra is software for creating models of complex chemical structures, commonly used in chemistry and related science and live sciences disciplines. It also has DNA sequencing and thin-layer chromatography tools. It's sort of a "chemistry office suite". We've had scattered versions in our labs, but the software wasn't backwards compatible and many versions didn't work in the new Mac OS, so we went for a site license.

Right now we're in a period of trial license until July 1. Beginning July 1 we start a site license that extends through June 30, 2008. Details went on the sitelicensed website about a month ago, and at this point we have just over 100 downloads of the software. The cost of those licenses would be somewhere around 5-6 times over the cost of the site license already at this point.

News will be spread by word of mouth among users, but we want to be sure that if anyone has new faculty that would be able to use this that they don't go out and purchase it. Any Iowa State staff, student, faculty or affiliate can install it on as many computers as they might reasonably have (the license specifies about six). Once installed a user registers with Cambridgesoft at their website with their ISU credentials. Then the user will receive a serial number for the software. If you want to install ChemBioDraw in a lab, Steve has a lab serial number for use on computers in a lab setting. He can share that with you if you have use for it.

This is listed on the sitelicensed page of the IT site at http://www.it.iastate.edu/sldb/. See http://www.it.iastate.edu/sldb/view.php?id=26 for more info.

c. Invitation for comments: Sunsetting IPX -- Jennifer Lohrbach, ITS

The ITS Netcomm group would like to eliminate the use of the IPX protocol (formerly used by Novell Netware) on the campus network. We've been wanting to do this for some time now and would like to do this by the end of the year, but there are still some people using it. A scan of the network indicated that there are 949 devices still running IPX, which is much higher than we expected. We would like people to transition from IPX to IP and need to know how long people will need for us to do this.

Determine if this will impact you, and figure out how long it will take to transition. Send mail to lohrbach@iastate.edu if you have concerns. There are some old printers that may not be able to do IP, and they may need to be replaced. Is end of this calendar year reasonable? Will we need to wait until next summer? Let Jennifer know what you think.

Q: When you configure a printer to have IPX, and you turn it off, will you have to touch that printer and turn IPX off?
A: Probably. ITS has some of those printers as well.

July 8 is probably not a reasonable day; we'll look at the end of the calendar year.

d. Variation in next month's meeting schedule -- Dan C.

There's a conflict for 206 Durham Center on the normal meeting date, so we'll be meeting on Monday, June 23, next month. Dan will send reminders as the month goes on.

3. Presentation:

a. iTunes at ISU and Classroom Capture technology -- Jim Twetten, ITS

iTunes University @ ISU

We've been working on this for a while, and it relates to classroom capture.

What is podcasting?

(See the wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting for more information.)

There's iTunes, and then there's iTunes...

iTunes - digital media player on your computer
iTunes Music Store - a place to find digital media to download (some free, some for purchase)
iTunes University - a place within the iTunes Music Store where universities can store content

ISU is an iTunes U campus

We nearly abandoned the negotiations because Apple was being difficult legally. When we informed them that it just wasn't going to work out, they made major concessions and we were back on track.

The iTunes U sites contain a public site and an authenticated site, so you either go to the public site as a guest or log in to the authenticated site with your university credentials. Public site content is open to anyone. You do have to have iTunes installed; that's one of its drawbacks.

So far the ISU public site only has a couple of items, but it will show a number of icons. The authenticated site uses the usual PubCookie login.

You can download individual podcasts or subscribe to a series. Subscribing automatically downloads new content to your machine.

If you go to iTunes U under the Music Store, you'll be able to browse lots of other universities' public sites. U. Cal Berkeley has elected to put some of their courses in their public sites. MIT has also put course materials on their public site through their OpenCourseware initiative. Yes, that means that I can attend all the lectures for a class without even enrolling in it. You have to be pretty motivated to sit through an entire course without getting credit for it, though.

Materials you can put on a site:

Q: How do you create video for this?
A: The tools are ubiquitous, it's really easy to do, and many professors are actually doing this themselves with simple webcams. Other groups use multi-camera crews doing formal shooting and post-production. It's a wide spectrum.

Legal stuff

Q: Does ISU retain copyright on the public site material?
A: Yes, but Apple is granted permission to use.

Working arrangment

The ISU site can be sub-divided with different individuals providing admin support for each section/division. If you want to control and provide support for your own area, we can grant admin rights to the appropriate departmental staff. We'd prefer to see this administratively deployed and almost decentralized.

Q: What if we're already doing a podcast and want to get it on iTunes?
A: That's not a problem; contact Jim Twetten or Mike Wilson and they'll get you set up.

Classroom capture uses

In distance education, the students are receiving this info for the first time, as opposed to reviewing materials for on-campus students. Your materials need to be better designed for distance education.

Classroom capture can be

Tools for capturing the classroom

Common concern: "If I put that on an iTunes site, students will stop coming to class." Jim's response: "If students can learn everything in your class by viewing a video, then there's something wrong with your class." Many people use delayed posting, holding off posting the video for a few days so that students who don't show up for class are several days behind. For the most part, students in classes where this technology is used still show up for class, but use the video for review. Some faculty also pause recording when they talk about what's on the exam; that gives students an additional incentive to show up for class.

We will be piloting this in the fall.

Q: What does the Echo360 software record?
A: The software will capture audio from a mike, plus whatever is on the computer's screen (it'll make a new thumbnail when the screen changes). It will not capture anything outside the computer. We have ways to integrate the classroom audio into the recording.

Q: What kind of utilization data do you get from iTunes U? Can IP numbers downloading material be identified?
A: A weekly report indicates the number of times items have been downloaded, other details; we will have to decide who gets that information.

Q: Will stuff stay up indefinitely, or will it go down at the end of semester?
A: That's a good question; we need to figure out a policy on that. There is a 500 GB storage limit; the test materials posted indicate that we should not see any problems for some time.

Q: Is there any restriction on republishing materials as both an iTunes and a general feed?
A: No, we can do whatever we want there. Most materials will be the intellectual property of the faculty member, so they can do that if they choose; other materials will depend on the copyright.

Q: Can we restrict access by class so only students in that class can see the material?
A: Obviously that would be a good thing, and we're working on that.

Q: Do you see this competing with WebCT?
A: No, it's more complementary. It's a better feed for large media files than WebCT is.

Q: I assume we'll be asked to install iTunes on public systems so people can use it?
A: Oh, probably. We'll look into that further. Jim will look into how other schools have dealt with that. There were complaints from the group about iTunes being buggy, resource-intensive, and update-prone.

4. New Business:

a. Open floor to questions and comments

Q: Did everyone get through Kerberos 4 to 5?
Scott Saunders: It's continuing. We expect there are individuals who will contact us who haven't noticed yet, but will later. We estimate that this may end around September 30.

5. Next meeting: June 23, 2008 to be held in 206 Durham Center:

Please note this is a Monday. The meeting was moved to allow us to use our regular meeting place.

6. Adjournment at 2:59 pm.