Interview with Research Support Group (Oct 30)

Sequence of Events

Debbie makes an ST, one per student, asking the research group to install equipment for that student. She puts in the office, equipment type from desktop equipment request form, desk, and userid if available.

Sometimes problems result from UWdir userids not being assigned as early as might be considered desirable.

Debbie gets the userids from Jennifer, who writes them on the desktop equipment request form. Jennifer receives these forms from faculty members before passing them over to Debbie. Jennifer also receives all the incoming student desk assignments.

ST first goes to Phil. If it will be "APD" (Advisor-Provided Desktop) he just removes his name. Next to Lawrence who fills in the subscription code on the ST item. This will be used for billable time related to setup, and usually for other billable work if any. The ST may also indicate removal of previous equipment.

For thin clients, Phil/Clayton handle the deployment. For PC/Laptop, Phil images the machine, records the name, then research support group delivers/installs it, and updates E+I. However, when doing lots, E+I update is a significant overhead. The fix has been for Paul Thompson to visit the rooms and question and give them an extra scan to fix up the equipment locations. This is especially good for monitors, which are interchangeable unlike the computers themselves.

DNS needs to be updated using Maintain. The Mac address needs to be confirmed. As well, the room location, user, contact info should all be set up. These are DNS text fields.

ONA is used to update the VLAN and machine name. This is a web interface provided by IST but apparently most of the stuff auto-updates from DNS. Updating ONA is not the annoyingly tricky part of the job.

Would be nice to update DNS Mac info from E+I Mac info. Talked a bit about CNAMEs, which can't be updated using the bulk update feature of Maintain.

CSCF can update E+I, DNS, ONA, but not Debbie's spreadsheet. Vice versa too - Debbie may know of a room swap, but CSCF won't necessarily know.

Lawrence wants Debbie's and Jennifer's spreadsheets online, and wants the incoming term information also available. Phone numbers should be available as well. Sometimes a large office will have 2 extensions. We also need the authoritative information on students' supervisors. Also need to know for a given user which machines they use.

1 machine can have multiple Mac addresses, but not really the reverse (normally?). 1 Mac address can have multiple IPs (virtual IPs). Not really the reverse. Further discussion with Jason seems to suggest that anything is possible but 1 IP on multiple Macs, or 1 Mac on multiple machines would be weird unusual setup that would apply to very specific file servers or network hardware, not to the masses of machines in use by labs and students.

What about laptop locations? Do we try to put barcodes on personally-owned machines? Probably not.

About Subscriptions

A bunch of professors can get together and purchase blocks of "dedicated" support for them and for their students. All members, their students, and their desktops and group webserver and other servers are covered by this. There are also "desktop" subscription for specific machines.

The research subscription database knows which machines are supported by which code.

About "Pool" Students

Some students are assigned to no particular supervisor at first, until they have worked out who will be their supervisor. Who fills out their desktop support form? It seems obvious that a tentative supervisor should be assigned. But it's important to note that at some level these students do not have a supervisor until their supervisor has been designated.

-- IsaacMorland - 07 Nov 2006