UNIX ADMINISTRATORS MEETING
February 7, 2006

Introduction
The first meeting of Unix Administrators the Spring semester brought out over 30 members. Rick Thomas of Laboratory of Computer Science Research led the meeting. The following is a summary of the meeting summary:

Superbowl Commercial Poll
The winner of the best Superbowl commercial was the Mastercard's MacGyver commercial. You can view it HERE.

Sakai/Cyberinfrastructure Event and Support
Tom Grzelak of OIRT presented a couple of announcements relative to events this spring.
  • A call for those interested in UCS/UCM/Sysadmin training in Sakai. Contact Gayle Stein gstein@rutgers.edu to sign up. Training dates will be announced later this spring.
  • A vendor fair will be conducted on Wednesday, March 8 from 10AM until 3PM in the Busch Campus Center Multi-Purpose Room. Over 20 vendors will be there with many IT solutions. Breakout sessions with the vendors will be conducted throughout the day.
  • A cyberinfrastructure/Internet2 symposium entitled "Information Technology for Research: The Impact of National Directions in Cyberinfrastructure" will be conducted on Tuesday, April 4th from 9AM-4PM on the New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses. This is an important event to IT staff that support research computing as it will highlight the IT expectations and pressures associated with a cyberinfrastructure environment. The agenda for the event is posted HERE.
  • There will be hands-on brown bag lunches on videoconferencing held within the next month. February 17th with AccessGrid/Insors and March 9th with Polycomm. Please visit the web site for more information and to register.
  • The internet2.rutgers.edu site is back online with new information on research support and services available. Please check it out to see some of the middleware, working groups and initiatives that have been ongoing with Internet2.

SMTP Authentication/Mailman Conversion
Roy Marantz of NBCS discussed the upcoming SMTP Authentication and Mailman changeover. SMTP authentication will be required for people relaying email through rci and eden. Regarding the Listserv to Mailman conversion, Mailman has very significant performance and other improvements over Listserv. List owners will be sent email with instructions on how the migration will occur.

Identity Theft Act
Bruce Rights of IPS discussed some of the aspects of New Jersey's new Identity Theft Act. A university URL for more information can be found HERE. There is impact on several levels with this law. Please review it and adapt your incident response plans accordingly. There also has been an uptick in the number of supeonas being issued to Rutgers for computer-based information. Please beware of this.

Creating Alerts in the MyRutgers Portal
Lars Sorensen of LCSR did a presentation on a software application they are developing to allow units to make use of the alert system built into the myRutgers portal. Units at Rutgers will be able to make use of the software to send alerts to specific students within their portal environment. To see Lars' presentation, go to this LINK. To find out more about the software being developed, go to this LINK

Disk-to-Disk Backups with Rsync
Rob Tuck of LCSR did a presentation on LCSR is switching off of tape backup and moving toward disk backup. They have developed a methodology for this using rsync. Rob described how their system works and discussed additional options including using packages like Snapback2 and RSnapshot. To see Rob's presentation, go to this LINK.

Unix Meeting Podcasts
Missed the meeting? Catch the live action of the LCSR presentations with their podcasts. Check out:

Next Meeting
The next meeting is scheduled for March 7th at 1:30PM in Center Hall at the Busch Campus Center.

For questions or comments about this site, contact oirt@rutgers.edu
Last updated: Monday, 13-Feb-2006 15:44:05 EST

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