Linux Working Group

Meeting Date

• TEAMS: 2022-10-19

Invited

• Anthony (group leader), Clayton, Guoxiang, Lori, Fraser, Devon, Nathan, Nick, Todd, Dave, O

Attendees

• Anthony, Fraser, Clayton, Nathan, Guoxiang, Dave, Devon, Todd, O

Review and accept previous meeting minutes.

• CsLWGMeeting20220921

Review last meeting's Action Items

• Lori - will book a meeting re: suexec-flex https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=950947
  • Nathan to discuss with Lori and Issac to determine who should be rebuilding the package and redistributing the deb patch
    • Anthony provided a recipe on how to do this. Once the package is ready, distribution is easy and there are processes available for this.
• OpenVPN upgrade: containers and 2FA: https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=1231092
  • Lori and Clayton are working together on this and work is progressing.
  • Nathan reports successful testing from Lori so things look good.
  • Anthony is negotiating with IST security group and keeping the "dogs at bay" as they are requesting these updates.
• Mike Patterson [UW-RT #1231841] wants us to patch/upgrade cups1.cs.uwaterloo.ca.
  • Fraser is transitioning DNS records to cups2
  • Fraser/Anthony will deploy host based firewall on cups1 to restrict access until cups2 is feature complete
  • cups1 is now off. Anthony will archive cups1 fs. Fraser providing notes on work in RT.
  • Fraser requires cups1 fs to remain readable for the time being as it just recently retired.
  • cups2 appears to be functioning. cups.cs now points to this.
• Dave needs to reach out to IST to discuss DNS issues
  • The contact in IST (Dave Aldwinkle) is back at work * Is IST querying all our DNS servers or just a single one? Could this be a limitation of infoblox * Work is picking up on this now. So more updates upcoming. * Anthony will start a new Jira ticket conversation with IST to get this going further.
• www.cs.uwaterloo.ca outage postmortem
  • Next step: IST's networking group ought to be contacted to determine whether they made any changes on the day of the incident.
    • Has anyone done this?
    • O will lay the communication line to IST for this with Lisa Tomalty to mitigate these outages.
• Ubuntu 22.04 availability
  • Strictly pre-production, see https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/cscf/internal/infrastructure/guidelines/LifeCycle/OS/Ubuntu-LTS/
    • 22.04 cloud hosts may need to be rebooted as needed for networking changes
  • KVM instances available
  • LXC instances somewhat available in M3 and DC
    • No 100G ring access yet, waiting on layer 1 equipment
    • Dave will help Anthony with layer 1 needs.
  • Separation of TEACHING and GENERAL VLANs: this is a CS legacy separation, do we believe IST's firewall config is sufficient to maintain this ?
    • As far as we know, IST's firewall only cares about world to public IP space (campus). Anthony can query IST further on this to confirm.
• Sponsoring two new accounts on linux.student.cs for coop-based teaching region user support: erwarren and cscfcoop [O]
  • https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=1248464
  • erwarren@linux.student.cs is good to go. Thank you Clayton.
  • O notes that erwarren is blind and uses CLI interfaces and Mac's screen reader abilities to do software development. He really likes linux as well.
  • Clayton indicates that cscfcoop@linux.student.cs is also good to go. O will work with that account further.
  • Dave points out that Unix tutorials use to occur via the CS Club. Anthony may have some notes that he can forward. O is interested in establishing these again with the aim to help users of linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca.
  • Is there a landing page for first-time linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca ? O will work with erwarren on this.
• Impending resource heavy use on linux.student.cs Winter 2023 (cs136 and cs489), some relevant details and questions on how best to handle users [O]
  • What exactly is coming: vscode times 1000+ persons and VirtualBox times 80+ persons; timings for usage overlap with the former occurring more frequently throughout the term than the latter.
  • Biggest concerns with VirtualBox: Memory allocated for instances. O notes that by default, each instance allocates 4GB. O can tune this. Anthony reminds that this will need to be distributed across the linux.student.cs hosts.
  • O and Stacey Watson are testing VirtualBox on ubuntu2004-008.student.cs
  • With respect to vscode, user-level process discipline needed to prevent resource hogging. Get users to stick with one host and to clean up after themselves !
  • Todd reminds that this is happening at lower scale (less users) this term in CS136. O will monitor with Stacey and encourage/develop user-level discipline now so that it is part of the assignment instructions.

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