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.

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.
  • 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.
  • Nick queried on random reboots that sometimes occur on linux.student.cs hosts. Sysadmin staff are aware of this and investigation is ongoing.

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Topic revision: r4 - 2022-11-02 - YiLee
 
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