UNIX ADMINISTRATORS MEETING
September 6th, 2005

The first meeting of Unix Administrators in nearly a year brought out over 45 members. Stan Kolasa, Associate Director - Camden Computing Services, led the meeting.

Chuck Hedrick spoke on Social Security Number policy. By February 2006, the use of SSN as a student ID number will cease. Students with be assigned student ID numbers that are still 9 digits long, but of a range that is not issued by Social Security. Staff ID numbers will remain as the SSN for now. Those involved in shadow financial systems, account creation tools, etc. that use SSN as the ID number for students must pay attention to this change. All students who currently had student ID numbers that are the same as their SSN will have new ID numbers and ID cards issued to them before February. One impact of significance is swipe locks. Students who get new IDs will need to have their swipe card data reentered into the swip locks they have had access to. Follow-up information will be coming in the November meeting.

Stan Kolasa led a discussion about online web credit cards transaction processing. He was approached by 2 groups on his campus about this issue and he was able to identify key people at the university to speak with. The preferred vehicle for using credit cards on university websites is the WOLP (Web On-line Payment) system from ACS. Contacts are:

• Ellen Law (OIT/ACS) - is the main WOLP (Web On-line Payment) person. The use of WOLP as the back end process to handle the transations is something both the Treasurers office and Controllers office recommended. Considering the new VISA/PCI regulations, WOLP is almost a must.
• Bill Haberman - Treasurers office
• Terry Wooding - Controllers office

WOLP is a backend service. A storefront/frontend is required to interface with WOLP. It is a significant effort to integrate a frontend system with WOLP. MSSG has developed a successful frontend to WOLP. Armen Varjabedian and Walead Abdrabouh from MSSG spoke about the relative services MSSG can provided needed including front end applications (storefront/shopping cart) even servers to house the web sites on. This is a for fee service. It is important to note that there are significant costs (around ~$2K) to develop a storefront (development and WOLP subscription charges). The web page dealing with some of the surrounding issues is http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~univcont/creditsecurity.

There was significant discussion on Solaris 10. Several interesting issues were raised including the need for a root password in order to boot up to single user mode, and working without /etc/rc scripts (a big change in thinking). There was some reported problems getting the ru_pam modules to work with Solaris 10. However, Dan Riesman from ESS reported that his group was able to get the ru_pam modules to work.

There were also some open discussions about solaris and linux. Some are moving away from Sun Solaris systems to linux. Others still find Sun/Solaris useful for large java applications. There were also questions on how many were using Open Bsd linux (not many). There seems to be a strong shift towards linux from Solaris which has been noted for the last several years.

The next meeting is scheduled for November 2nd at 1:30PM in Center Hall, Busch Student Center.