UNIX ADMINISTRATORS MEETING
November 1, 2005

The second meeting of Unix Administrators this semester brought out over 30 members. Nath Kaplan and Jennifer Scalf of Newark Computing Services, led the meeting. The following meeting summary was prepared by Jennifer Scalf.

We had a lively discussion about the naming conventions of server groups on the campuses. Newark central systems servers were named after Greek and Roman gods. We have all kinds of links between our servers based on the parent and children gods and goddesses in the Greek pantheon. Other admins said their servers were various names for Heaven and Hell. Others because of creatures or businesses that lived near their location. Some were department specific, like the math department and algorithms and mathematicians. And of course some were just for fun, like Simpsons characters and Galaxy Quest. Some questions that were brought up were; How to we know if a collection of names is taken or how do we prevent stepping on toes? I believe the consensus was these names are not too serious and using tools like 'host -a' you can see who has started what series of names.

I briefly went over Newark's account clean procedures. We do 2 yearly cleanups on the pegasus (student) server and 1 on andromeda (faculty/staff). Basil talked about eden's account cleanup and Roy talked about rci's. We all pretty much do the same thing, except some of us give less amounts of time to dispute account closure. There was a question of how we notify users of deletion. I believe most people said the notification was only via email. However some departments do seem to go a bit beyond that. I brought up that the account policies for all servers is online and it seems most departments also have acceptable use policies and some have academic policies users must review before creating accounts.

For the Apache log monitoring, specifically for web stats; most admins use either Webalizer, awstats, just mrtg, or NetIQ. Aaron said they were looking into another php tool but I've forgotten the name. Maybe we'll revisit this at a future meeting. In Newark we use Webalizer and a perl script Chris W wrote to monitor, for example, the "top talkers" on our servers. As for CMSs or online forms already installed for users to access, Roy said they have tikiwiki and a webform written in house and that they have php installed for users to create their own. In Newark we've looked into Zope and we also have php and mysql available for use. I think the main idea was php is there to use in most cases. And if they did not want to write their own it could be written by MSSG.

Beth talked about the recent virus outbreak (Click HERE for graph) and that she will be sending email, I want to make it clear that her communications will be via email. And that there are going to be some courses this spring on hardening Windows and Unix systems we should look forward to.

We talked a bit about AFS Clustering. This topic was a requested one. At this time, it does not appear anyone has an AFS cluster setup at Rutgers. AFS, which stands for Andrew File System, is a distributed file system created at CMU. For more information about it please see http://openafs.org/. I recommend the slides from the Best Practices workshop CMU held this summer.

Tom G gave a presentation and answered questions about Sakai. For those not familiar with Sakai, the Rutgers installation and more information is found on: http://sakai.rutgers.edu The new pilot version is out there, we should all take a look, create a group and have a good time. Tom also stressed that this is a great collaboration tool, not just a course management system.

The next meeting is scheduled for December 6th at 1:30PM in Center Hall, Busch Student Center.