Minutes of
The University of Florida CISE Department
Facilities and Equipment Committee

14 October 1999

Members in Attendance

Others in Attendance

Members Absent

Report of Proceedings

  1. The meeting was called to order at 1:30 PM.

  2. The agenda was accepted by unanimous consent

  3. J. Peters brought up the issue of having a scheduled service window. Such a service window would allow people to expect down-times at well-known time periods and they could adjust their schedules and expectations accordingly. ACTION: The system personnel are to report on a suggested service window in the next meeting.

  4. J. Peters inquired about the status of Linux deployment. System personnel stated that they expect to have a Linux deployment based on Red-Hat completed by the end of November.

  5. J. Wilson gave an update on the Gartner Lab status and brought forth the issue of an access policy for groups of lab users. With our new Gator-One Card entry system, we will need to authorize users to gain access to specific areas during given time periods.

    The access levels discussed and agreed to by unanimous consent were the following:

    Room 114
    Faculty and Graduate Students 24 hours
    Undergraduates during daytime operating hours.
    Room 113 (Systems Lab)
    Lee authorizes access to this room
    Room 115 (Networks Laboratory)
    Newman, Helal, and Liu authorize access to this room
    Room 166 (Multimedia)
    All users access 24 hours

  6. Some discussion was held concerning the disposition of room E309 after the Gartner Lab is open. S. Helal suggested that we should provide DHCP controlled network access for student notebook computers. J. Hranicky noted that it might be nice to leave the carrels.

  7. P. Benett brought up the idea that we could use room 413 for the Harris Communications lab, noting that the raised floor could be beneficial to lab operation. S. Helal agreed that this might be useful. It was unanimously agreed that J. Wilson would follow up by investigating this idea.

  8. Room 413 was identified as a possible place to relocate ACM. M. Frank was to follow up on this.

  9. J. Hranicky discussed the operation of our Cluster and the Raid Level 0+1 striping plan. He also discussed the problems we'd had recently with one A5000 disk array.

    Moved: S. Helal, Seconded: S. Thebaut
    We should purchase maintenance for the Cluster and get SCSI disks to provide a redundant non-mirrored backup.

    Motion passed unanimously.

  10. The issue of how much disk storage should be purchased was brought up. J. Wilson noted that there is currently an outstanding commitment by Columbia University to provide approximately $30,000 worth of equipment to UF. The list of equipment to be purchased includes 4 18-GB fiber-channel disks.

    ACTION: S. Beck was charged with reporting on current disk utilization on the cluster, and with estimating resources necessary to provide quota in the amounts of 1G per faculty member, 500M per grad student, and 50M per undergrad.

  11. The meeting was adjourned at approximately 2:45.

Prepared By

Joseph N. Wilson
This document is copyright 1998 by Joseph N. Wilson.