Linux Working Group

Meeting Date

• TEAMS: 2022-11-02

Invited

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

Attendees

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

Review and accept previous meeting minutes.

• CsLWGMeeting20221019

Review last meeting's Action Items

• 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
    • Progress?
      • Dave's view of the long run, is that this work would be one of the responsibilities of the empty INF position. I just don't see current INF staffing being able to take this until later in Winter term (maybe as part of final Ubuntu 22.04 cleanup to go production).
  • Anthony will interact further in ticket.
  • Need documentation for this project and some example test cases to motivate new developers.
• OpenVPN upgrade: containers and 2FA: https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=1231092
  • IST seems sufficiently mollified by recent progress as of October 28th
• Mike Patterson [UW-RT #1231841] wants us to patch/upgrade cups1.cs.uwaterloo.ca.
  • 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.
  • Schedule decommissioning of cups1
  • cups1 has been turned off, final administrative clean-up and deletion needed.
• 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. * Have not done this yet, will coordinate with Dave.
  • M3 DNS isn't ready. Dave will follow-up with Anthony and have a game plan prior to contacting IST 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.
      • O has been collecting and reporting info to IST reps (like Lisa). They will contact her after this meeting to emphasize of the importance of www.cs.uwaterloo.ca up-time.
• Ubuntu 22.04 availability
  • No 100G ring access yet for LXC instances, 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?
    • What exactly is the requirement here? Are we actually meeting the requirement at present? Have we ever?
    • 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.
      • Turns out there are firewalls between certain networks on campus but at present they don't do anything? Will need to confirm.
    • Historically there was a need to keep the regions as separate as possible, possibly as a logical consequence of user-base separation. There is a concern that reality doesn't sync with this need and the separation is "porous".
    • More investigation/guidance needed.
• 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.
  • https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/resources/tech-talks/Unix-101-Winter-2022-Session-1/ is all Anthony could find.
  • Good news, the CS club (CSC) is still running Unix 101 on a somewhat regular basis.
  • Cool - O will run with this info.
  • Nick reminds that CS136L actually focuses on Linux usage (cli, bash, etc) for students. It is an online course. Nomair Naeem is the faculty involved in designing it and using OpenEdX for this. This is really positive information.
• Is there a landing page for first-time linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca ? O will work with erwarren on this.
  • Updates to be published on git.uwaterloo.ca soon.
• No snapshots on homedirs and there was an announcement sent out in August that they would be made available.
  • There are clients asking about this.
  • The intent is to turn them back on and this may be delayed due to other priorities.
  • O will bring this as an item to following cscfmgm meeting (they run hot and long already so there may be delays).
  • We need to respond to clients. O will work with cscfmgm to push a relevant general message out sooner if applicable.
  • It was pointed out that we cannot solely rely on rolling backups (Legato networker) as the intervals don't help "temporally local roll-back" needs that many student users and their instructors rely on.
• Do we have a disaster recovery plan ? It appears that staff time may need to be devoted on creating/updating this. cscfmgm meeting agenda item possibly. Dave will lead the discussion for this.
  • There do exist frameworks/templates for such plans. Anthony indicates experience with this type of planning.
  • Is there a ticket for evaluating backup software ? https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=1221801
• Nick queried on random reboots that sometimes occur on linux.student.cs hosts. Sysadmin staff are aware of this and investigation is ongoing.
  • Master ticket tracking crashes: https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=1214857 (see children links)
  • Another issue appears as a "permission denied" error intermittently on simple file operations. Example incident on Oct 30: https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/Ticket/Display.html?id=1214018#txn-30857983

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