Since the last time I reported, the working operations have been fairly stable.
In the Manors infrastructure we have worked with the vendor to resolve some issues with access points in Ahern manor. We had a piece of equipment, a network switch, connecting the north end manors that started an accelerating path toward instability, but replacing it seems to have resolved this issue. We have plans to look at rearranging the equipment in the Tupper to provision this equipment with a UPS [Uninteruptable Power Supply].
We have found a device that appears to be able to bridge the Enterprise authentication we use for wifi to the consumer (“pre-shared key”) level that seems to be the only thing available in some consumer devices like Amazon Echoes or smart-TVs. Early piloting of this device seems to have been a success.
We continue to have a long backlog of pending maintenance and planned modifications, but insufficient volunteer hours to perform them all.
Since the last AGM, we have had one serious spam generation incident, and a small incident that had mail sent to Hotmail bouncing for a few days. It is my hope that the following item will help with this.
I am happy to report through the efforts of the Dalhousie CS Software Engineering course group that we are finally close to re-establishing the ability for members to change their passwords for themselves. This should allow people to change their passwords more frequently and pick good passwords.
Over the summer we had a team would on developing our new website. For the past month we have had it online for comment, and it is our hope to bring it live as the front page very soon.
As with the last time that I reported, I am hoping to recruit additional NSCC interns, and to conduct some recruiting among Dalhousie Computer Science majors.
I welcome your questions.
Respectfully submitted by Chris Maxwell
Chair of Technical Committee