OIT Technology Meeting - February 2007

Announcements

The OIT Technology Meeting, for the first time, was video conferenced to the Camden and Newark campuses, allowing those on those campuses to participate without having to drive to Piscataway.

Beth Binde, IPS
IPS is offering a another SANS Local Mentor Program class this year. This course focuses on System Forensics, Investigation, and Response. It is an advanced course. If this is your first security course, please speak with Beth prior to registration to make sure you have the appropriate background. The fee, which is discounted from normal SANS fees, is $1,900, which includes books, study materials, and online resources. In order to register, go to (log in with NetID) https://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~infopro/sans/gcfa.php to find the links to the SANS registration and the discount code. Contact Beth if you have questions. Her contact information is on the above web page.

Galen Work, OIT
Progress is ongoing with the University master lease agreement that had been discussed previously.

The University, in an effort to formalize its business relationship with technology vendors, is pursuing formal contracts stipulating the conditions of purchase, shipping, and bill processing for their technology. To date, very few such contracts have existed, have not covered the institution's most popular vendors, and typically refer to terms favoring the vendor. We are interested in changing those terms to favor the interests of the University and the people who purchase its technology. We are also interested in pursuing contractual terms that could include items such as minimum discounts, regularly adjusted discounts, and punchouts in RIAS Exchange for online ordering.

The University has been interested in a computer supplies contract for quite a while. The specifications were sent out for bid, and the contract was awarded to W.B. Mason. This is a "preferred vendor" arrangement, not an exclusive deal, so you may still use other vendors. W.B. Mason will be available as an "Exchange Supplier" in RIAS. CDWG will no longer be available as an "Exchange Supplier", but you may still purchase from CDWG by making a non-catalog purchase. If you have any issues with W.B. Mason, or are not satisfied with their product selection, please convey your opinions to Galen and/or Purchasing. The contract is for two years with three optional one year extensions. W.B. Mason is a regional company and does their own deliveries, no FedEx or UPS.

A new website has been created, http://findtech.rutgers.edu, that will be a resource for technology purchasing. There are links to the vendor pricing sites. Some of the vendors are giving their most aggressive pricing via their educational pricing sites. There are also links to make personal purchase where you will receive the discounted educational pricing.

Tim Mills, MSSG
In 2005, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act which changed the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time (DST). This will affect any time based system as there will be a one hour descrepancy on systems that do not switch to DST at the correct time. This can especially cause authentication issues when Kerberos is involved. Current Microsoft products will have updates available via Automatic Update. Microsoft products that fall in the category of "extended support," such as Windows 2000, 2000 Server, and Exchange 2000, will have an update available, but for a fee. Microsoft is charging educational institutions $4,000 for the updates, but we were able to obtain it for free. The updates will be available from the University Software Portal. Microsoft will not provide patches for products no longer in "extended support," Windows XP SP1, 9x, ME, NT4, and Exchange 5.5. There is a way to manually update these items. The information on how to manually fix them is available in Microsoft knowledgebase article KB914387. Additional information, including information on other operating systems, is available in Tim's presentation or at either of these sites:

http://mssg.rutgers.edu/documentation/DST2007/
http://computing.camden.rutgers.edu/announce/DST2007.php

The Microsoft Campus Agreement has been signed. The software is available from the University Software Portal. The Campus Agreement covers products that are to be installed on university owned equipment ONLY. There will be some software available for installation by faculty and staff on personally owned equipment, but there is a fee involved for those packages. The included products for university owned equipment are free, but some of them still require a license key during installation. The license keys can be obtained by ordering them in the Software Portal. When ordering licence keys, it is requested that you enter in an accurate quantity for statistical purposes.

Vista, while not requiring a license key, will require activation to a local activation server. There is currently no antivirus software available from Trend that is compatible with Vista. The RADS infrastructure that will support Vista is going to take some time to implement, so you are encouraged to not do any wide deployments of Vista at this time. IT staff are certainly encouraged to begin familiarizing themselves with Vista at this time. Also, for SAS users, a Vista compatible version will not be available until Q4 of 2007. More information is available in Tim's presentation or in the Campus Agreement FAQ.

Tom Grzelak, OIRT
There is a new site license available for Mathematica. It is available on the Central Systems machines, in the campus labs, and from the University Software Portal.

RULink's hardware will be upgraded on February 16, beginning after business hours. One day of downtime has been scheduled for the upgrade.

When the format of the PC/LAN Administrator's meetings were changed to the current OIT Technology Meetings, it meant the elimination of vendor presentations from these meetings. Recognizing the need to receive information from the vendors, MSSG and OIRT have put together a framework for vendor presentations. Details will be provided, but currently scheduled are:

February 21 - VMWare (Busch Campus Center)
March 28 - Apple
April 18 - Polycom
May 16 - Novell

Other upcoming IT events include:

March 8 - Matlab training available on campus
March 21 - Internet2 Symposium
April 11 - 2nd Annual IT Vendor Fair

Presentations

Environmental and System Monitoring with HP Systems Insight Manager (HPSIM)
Herminio Rodriguez, Division of Life Sciences (DLS)
Environmental and systems monitoring of computer hardware is becoming increasingly important as machines become denser and produce tremendous amounts of heat. Using HP Systems Insight Manager (HPSIM) on HP Proliant Servers, Herminio demonstrated how he has his monitoring environment set-up, what parameters are checked, and how this has helped him operate his datacenter by proactively identifying problems.

System Monitoring with Nagios
Brian Loniewski, Central Systems and Services (CSS)
Nagios is an open source host, service and network monitoring program. Nagios runs on Linux/Unix, but it can monitor a large variety of systems and services. Instead of just checking that a machine is running, it verifies that the services are actually responding to requests. For example, it can send a request to port 80 on a server to verify that the web server is responding. You can define what triggers an alert and the "event handlers," how it responds to that alert (send an email, page, etc.). The summary screen shows any current problems. Servers are configured with their IP addresses, so DNS outages would not interfere with monitoring. Since it is open source, you can modify the supplied plug-ins, or write your own. CSS runs a distributed setup, which allows for scalability.

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