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Systems Support Users
Group Minutes |
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Systems Support Users
Group Minutes |
Present: Connie Barling, Shannon Covey, Bill Cummins, Tom Fowles, Julie Goodlick, Shawn Hayes, Eric Hodges (Chair), Deann Moran, Shirley Murphy, Donna Simms, Ari Turetzky, Linda Thomas, Jane Vorhies, Tim Szerlong
Absent: Kathy Beal, Erin Dwyer, Brian Hamrin, Ballard McCleskey, Carmen Plummer, Bart Lytel, Daniel Manson, Cheryl Young
Remote access to resources: from either another workstation than yours, on campus, or from off campus entirely: With Windows 2000 roaming profiles enable us to see what you see on your desktop from anywhere else in our domain. The background image, the preferences made, the icons you see on your desktop follow you because it is stored on the server, not your individual computer. If you can access the server’s domain, you can see what you see on your desktop. You’re My Documents folder is a link to the server and can be accessed from anywhere you can access the server. Eudora can also be accessed this way on the 100 machines that have windows 2000 installed on them, of the 400 total to be done. ISU is moving to a campus domain of windows 2000 where one domain will exist for the whole campus and your individual profiles will be able to be accessed from any station on campus, not just those in our same domain (COPDOM03). The one campus wide domain may be ready by summer.
Email from remote locations (i.e., conferences, etc.) is best accessed using webmail.
Files from home – if dial in, can be mapped directly to any server, then you would have access to the files on that server. Using ADSL, too. A batch file can be written to map the drives.
For access from outside our calling area, i.e., a long distance call needed to access ISUnet, then there are firewalls that are in the way, etc. There is a solution in place, though. VPN, virtual private network allows us to pass the corporate network traffic over the public internet and basically establish a tunnel to get through the firewall and allow (quicker) connection to the server. This is the solution used to connect our Chicago Foundation office to ISUnet. VPN is in the pilot stage right now and is designed for the off campus apartment complexes and Greek houses so the same connection to ISUnet is available to off campus students that the dorms allow to on campus students. It may be put on the itools disks in fall.
SMS (Systems Management Server) is no longer in service. This is the software that allowed systems support personnel to take over your desktop from a remote location to “see” your machine and aid in whatever problems you might have. Systems support is looking at various software solutions to do the same thing. NetOP is one option. It runs your computer. Shirley Murphy uses a freeware, VNC. The U of I uses Citrix which takes the whole computer, not just a roaming profile. This requires a very large server with only so many machines using that server and is expensive. NetOp is less expensive. NetOp is targeted primarily as Systems Administrator for remote desktop support, whereas Citrix is targeted at the user for executing remote applications. In the interest of finding a single product to meet both needs, systems support is going to see if NetOp can work in both scenarios
Systems support’s request for purchasing a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of space was denied (cost = $20,000, ½ a terabyte = $12,000). So the question of what we can do to get through the next year with our present amount of server space remains to be answered. Could we have a file cleaning day or days? This topic was tabled until our next meeting, but please give it some thought before that meeting and it will be a topic of that meeting.