Things have been fairly stable since the last AGM. However, we have not had a great deal of progress on many of the outstanding technical issues either.
We have not had any major crashes or failures in our new home, and we are not completely switched over to our new uplink. Prior to the final switchover, we did have some outages as ACORN has upgraded their switching equipment.
The manors wifi equipment has generally been stable. We have some known issues though. We have a switch that occasionally misbehaves in the Tupper uplink. In addition, two of the Access Points (APs) in the north end manors keep going offline. Investigation continues on those. We have two additional APs that are offline in Ahern. We originally took them out for investigation prior to determining that it was a wiring issue. We are scheduling reinstall to see if the wiring issue has a temporary patch on it, or if we will have to actually replace the wires.
Bringing up the new webserver is still not complete, and since the last AGM we have lost three Information Providers possibly over issues with their hosting. However, in working on configuring the new webserver, it seems we also have a large number of IPs that are still online but have disappeared. This raises the question of what to do – on the one hand disappearing content is problem that we do not like to contribute to, but on the other, our currently subscribed IPs are helping to cover our costs and the non-currently subscribed are not. Further, occasionally they have caused us to received copyright notices which pulls resources away from other things.
I suspect we continue to have issues with the dialup system, but have not been able to definitively determine if the suspicions presented last time are accurate.
The mail system is mostly working, though the mailing list system still has not been fixed. We have twice had to make temporary changes to the rate limiting configuration to accommodate IPs sending annual messages to their members over BCC instead of mailing list.
We have now formed relationships with both Dalhousie Computer Science and some NSCC Interns.
The Dalhousie Software Engineering Outreach Course has been working on our management system, and this term is expected to finally start tacking the user own password changing module. Unfortunately, not only are most of their changes facing our admin staff rather than public-facing, but scheduling deployment has been delayed in scheduling technical staff for a dedicated period to make sure it is working in place. It is hoped that the password module can be deployed soon after implementation later this summer.
We also have an NSCC student doing a work experience with us this month redesigning the website. Christopher Charles will be presenting on the first half of this experience later in the agenda. As with the redesign that was started by the JL Isley students, it would be wonderful if we could get some stakeholders to comment on what they hope to get out of the website.
It is my hope that this initial placement of an NSCC student will be found fruitful and lead to additional students from the other IT streams who might be able to take on the required overhauls of our software support systems.
I welcome your questions.
Respectfully submitted by Chris Maxwell
Chair of Technical Committee