1. Neither the faculty nor staff are happy with the current problem reporting system. Since the staff members work closely together, all problems will be emailed to a staff distribution list, and the problems will be logged.

   NOTE: Gay, Chris, Brian, Vince, and Wes can be reached in the interim using the list, techstaff@pixel.cs.vt.edu

2. RE and EGM have compiled a new staff duties list which will be posted shortly. Wes will be added to the list so that undergraduate laboratory issues will be reported to him as well as to Gay and Chris. Emergency after-hours support procedures need to be worked out by the staff.

3. RE requested that the departmental mail distribution lists be posted and made readable. Vince will install Mailman for this purpose.

4. Dr. Bowman reported on his faculty computing resources survey. The survey results show that the strongest faculty concerns are related to their office computing environments. There was also considerable confusion about support policies and the process of getting assistance.

5. BM will edit and update an earlier copy of the Departmental Risk Analysis document to comply with the University request for a revision.

6. The offer from NOVA of a dialup server should be declined, since it does not seem to add anything to our current capabilities. The speed of the CS modem pool cannot be increased, but there was a feeling that it should be maintained as it is for those emergency situations when it is the only way to access departmental facilities.

7. The staff reported good results with Sassafras Keyserver, the license management system used by Radford University. The CRC recommends its adoption here. The cost is about $25 per client machine. We need to determine the number of clients we need to support and submit an order to Dr. Kafura (who supports its adoption).

8. BM reports that he will soon be ready to start supporting faculty on the domain server he has been working on.

9. Only CSGrad and one other departmental machine require a MATLAB license.

10. The graduate laboratory will be rewired starting Monday and will be down for several days. Provisions are being made to support students who need to work during break.

11. The Brodie computer installations are essentally complete.

12. We need to know whether additional network ports are required in 565. This is difficult to determine, since the cables vanish behind the furniture, and it is difficult to determine where they go.

13. With a few exceptions, the old gradlab computers have been distributed.

14. The equipment reservation system is operating well.

15. VR will send Ron Jarrell our newsserver logs and continue discussions related to making the campus server available to the Department.

16. VR is removing old CSGrad accounts, which is an arduous task, since an unknown number of those accounts are still in use by faculty and other students.

17. VR will report on the storage situation on CSGrad. We need to know why the disk are filling up and what the current capacity is.

18. There was discussion of the difficulties in maintaining updated CRC-related pages. It was decided that the CRC would maintain its own pages, rather than requesting constant updates by the Webmaster.

19. DB will create and maintain a news page to improve the communication of CRC-related activities to the department community.

20. RE reported that the departmental Alphas need OS updates and are in various states of maintenance.

21. Discussion of the Linux OS requirement was postponed, since we were running out of time, and our room had been reserved.

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