srcf

Minutes SRCF committee meeting Mon 6 Nov 2000

Venue: the SRCF bunker

Present:

	Peter Clay
	Hanna Wallach
	Jock Busuttil
	Martin Keegan
        

In attendance:

	Colin Watson

1. Matters arising

The minutes from the last meeting (Thu 27 April 2000) were confirmed.  

It was noted that Jock now asks for explicit permission to store
information on our server in accordance with Bob Dowling's
recommendations from the Data Protection Act.  This takes the form of
a stock email sent out to new users and societies before their
accounts are created.

It was noted that the deadline for the Societies Syndicate was missed.

We have not yet got ourselves on to the CS mailing lists, as was suggested in the previous meeting.

Jock was given root access on kern and has been using the access primarily for quick account creation.

www.srcf.ucam.org has now been added to the list of sites indexed by the university.  In addition, the link from www.cam.ac.uk/societies/ has been pointed at www.srcf.ucam.org.

2. SoCT document

Martin presented a document to the committee outlining his thoughts on possible directions for the SRCF to take at a technical level.  This document is reproduced in full below.  Following much discussion of the document, no resolutions were made to implement any of the details at this time, largely due to time constraints on the sysadmins from academic commitments.

SRCF SoCT document

         Version 1.0  -- first release (MK, 25/10/2000)

This document is a formal statement of the contents of discussions held over
the past few months between the Chairman, Secretary, sysadmins and other
relevant people within the SRCF. It is intended to give the Committee,
sysadmins and members an overview of the current thinking, and allow
us an easy mechanism for planning new undertakings (as people can now
say "I propose that we implement section 3 of the Statement of Current
Thinking v1.2, without s3.7, and get it done by the end of Term" and
everyone will know what they're talking about.

We're not committing to anything here. Below are found multiple mutually
contradictory ways of doing the same thing, in some cases. This is just
a way of making sure we're able to keep track of where we think we're going.
This is basically a request for discussion. There's a lot of material
here, and it is probably a good idea to have it all in one place.

The document is organised into five sections, in no useful order
whatsoever (in fact, most of the interesting stuff is at the bottom of
each logical unit).  They are Skills and Documentation (1), Structures
(2), Services (3), Administration (4), Sysadmin (5). A lot of issues
overlap between the sections, and unavoidably so. Most of the wording
is "We should do X".  This is intended to mean "Assuming the relevant
people have no objection after they've been told about X, X is going
to happen". The pros and cons of various courses of action are not
detailed here, nor are the lines of thought leading up to them; it's
expected that these will be brought up as necessary.

Practically everything in here would need to be ratified by the Committee
or the sysadmins.


1. Skills and Documentation
   ========================

As the SRCF grows more complex, it's going to get well past the state where
a single individual knows everything about how it is configured and run.
The best (and possibly only) way to deal with this is to document the
systems we have in place. We should have brief notes on how to perform
each function that we carry out (e.g., adding mailing lists, creating
users, manipulating aliases), with a little bit of detail about how things
work underneath; in addition, all local modifications to standard subsystems
(e.g., modifications to the exim.conf file) should be documented.

1.1 Material for the website
    ------------------------

1.1.1 Policies up on web


1.1.2 Services list up on web

authoritativeness; also classified as to how much they're advertised
or emphasised

1.1.3 Philosophy up on the web


1.2 Things the sysadmins need to know
    ---------------------------------

1.2.1 LDAP
1.2.2 SSL
1.2.3 userv
1.2.4 nroff

1.3 Man pages
    ---------

1.3.1 Local programmes

1.3.2 TODO lists and general doco


1.4 Committee information
    ---------------------

Mailing list decisions in addition to meeting minutes


2. Structures
   ==========

2.1 KGB (colleges, cusu, cucs)

2.2 IWJ10

2.3 admin specialisation / split by machine

2.4 publicity

2.5 monitoring (societies, etc), cusu system

3. Services
   ========

3.1 CS consultation / advice for users and groups

3.2 portfolio definition

3.3 SSL / security services

3.4 bulletin boards

3.5 snook

3.6 excession

3.7 acctmgr (and for Socs)

3.8 web based membership application and information

3.9 experimental VPN

3.10 IPv6 experimental

3.11 secure mail / news system

4. Administration
   ==============

4.1 policy on running services

4.2 sell the tapes

Either the tapes should be sold

4.3 backups

4.4 funding / broadening / sponsorship

4.5 image / Lavism

5. Sysadmin Issues
   ===============

5.1 Firewall / ipacct rules

We might well want to stick in IP accounting rules so that we can compare
our bandwith usage with that claimed by the University (not that any
discrepancy is anticipated), which figures are hard to come by.

5.2 LDAP

The nameservice used for passwd and group and email lookups should move
from `files' to `ldap'. MK has undertaken to write a document about this.

5.3 SMB/NCP/CODA

The potential provision of these filesharing systems should be
investigated and undertaken if feasible.

5.4 mailconfig

5.5 /users/

5.6 monitoring

5.7 mailing lists

5.8 sysnews

There should exist a user configurable facility for seeing which system
update news has occurred since last login (as opposed to the current
system whereby everyone sees the last five messages)

5.9 admin sessions

The meeting closed at 23:15.