Agenda:

1. Mirror update (DanielAllen)
2. Printing update (MikePatterson) - LinuxPrintingIssues
3. Slow gradpc's (MikePatterson)
4. Student Environment on linux - DanielAllen

Mirror Update

List of items to mirror, identified by DanielAllen and Dave Gawley. (in rough order of priority):

         What          Origin                                      Origin source info
         --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Debian        dynamic                                     mirror.debian.org
         FreeBSD                                                   ftp.ca.FreeBSD.org
         ftp.gnu.org   rsync://ftp.ibiblio.org/gnu/ftp
         CPAN          rsync://rsync.nic.funet.fi                  http://www.cpan.org/MIRRORED.BY
         X.org         ftp://ftp2.x.org                            http://x.org/Downloads_mirror.html
         Xfree         http://www.xfree86.org                      http://www.xfree86.org/mirrors/
         Ubuntu        http://archive.ubuntu.com
         Fedora        http://less.congeco.net/pub/fedora/linux/core
         OpenCD        rsync://sunsite.dk/TheOpenCD/releases/      http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/mirrors.php
         Morphix       http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/morphix/ 
         OpenBSD       http://www.openbsd.org/cvsup.html
         Knoppix       rsync://ftp.knoppix.nl/vol/2/metalab/distributions/knoppix/  http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
         Mandrake      ?
         CTAN          rsync://rsync.dante.de/CTAN/                http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/CTAN.sites?action=/index.html

We should be using mirror.cscf for the gradpcs.

Printing Update

Patrick sez he's written a bunch of CUPS tools in the last few days. He wrote a little package that asks print.math all the printers it knows about (via ssh), this talks to print2.math which is a CUPS server and it broadcasts correctly to his own workstation. He wrote a CUPS accounting package that uses a password file on print2.math. Chris wanted to know how it worked with laptops on wireless, which then matches up with our uid registry file. Mike needs to talk to Patrick. Patrick would like a Debian CUPS server to experiment with - Dave said it had been on Walter's queue, so looks like Daniel gets to do this now. Patrick knows he can broadcast to a Mac or Solaris machine, he just wants to make sure he can talk to a Debian server too. This neatly avoids the issue of putting passwords plaintext in the device URI. Woo hoo!

Lawrence wanted to know if this can fix the issues we've been having with our Aficio and Macs - maybe, but maybe we should just get a hardware card for our Aficio. Dave thinks that Graphics' service where they just let us pay the per-page cost is gonzo anyway. Patrick sez that IST are having similar issues with regard to printing too.

Patrick sez he'll also start deploying the web frontend soonish too, which would be neat. He's convinced that CUPS is the way to go to solve most of the printing problems we've been having.

Slow gradpc's

MikePatterson solved this problem, pretty sure - BIOS revisions! P4P800-VM. Chris said he's been having problems too.

Student environment on linux

Daniel: looking to set up a lab of Sun Opteron machines to be actual workstations instead of thin clients. He says that the ones he's been playing with only have a gig of RAM though. Matlab is an issue though. They haven't yet validated their 64 bit support - everything's 32 bit only still, under the covers. Lawrence says there's an org. called Star-P that's mostly working with SGI that will farm results out to big-RAM machines and give it back.

Accounts management

Patrick asked how well this was working on Linux machines. Dave says it's mostly working (as in it's functional) but there's lots of xh-whining that goes on, unsure if this is an issue with Debian or with accounts.

Other bits

Dave says one reason he's been pushing xhier on the Open Source machines is to try to get the configuration files into the xhier tree, not so much to distribute software. He already managed to get _runtime packages out, but he'd like something similar with the _conf packages but less "sneakily".

Next meeting

??? Mike will send an email.