Meeting notes, 11/5

From: Tom Holub (tom@LS.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 17:47:32 PST

  • Next message: Tom Holub: "Meeting 11/13, and discussion"

    In order of appearance:
    Tom Holub (L&S)
    Ilona Ozmon (CCS/socrates)
    Janet Garey (Library)
    Mike Sinatra (CNS)
    Zane Cooper (Haas)

    We began the meeting talking about membership. In addition to those listed
    above, Lucia Tsai (CalNet) and Gordon Adams (Chemistry) are on the mailing
    list. (Both offered plausible excuses for not showing up). We talked about
    uclink's role in this project, and it was decided that it would be good
    to have uclink at the table to get buy-in on the mail relaying issues.
    (We'll probably need uclink and/or socrates to support @Berkeley.EDU as
    a From: address on mail). I will ask Jerry Berkman to participate or
    nominate someone to participate. EECS was also mentioned; I will mail
    Hua-Pei Chen asking for a nomination. Consensus was that we had
    sufficient representation after those two additions; we don't want the
    commitee to be so large as to be ungainly.

    We discussed how this project would be funded; we're not sure at this point,
    but Jack McCredie seemed supportive in the ITAC meeting, and it really
    shouldn't be very expensive. Probably the management and funding will
    be decided within IST.

    "Berkeley.EDU Expeditionary Force" (BEEF) was agreed to as the committee
    name.

    We then moved on to a discussion of the issues the committee will be
    dealing with, and had an interesting and spirited introductory chat.
    Those issues include:

    * What is the namespace going to be? firstname_lastname is obvious, but has
      some non-trivial problems with conflicts. (lucia_tsai, for one). There
      are other auto-generated options (th492, for example). Self-selection
      is attractive to users, but possibly a headache to administer and police
      (can someone select chancellor_berdahl@Berkeley.EDU?) There could be
      LDAP database attributes for more than one address (maybe auto-generate
      th492, but allow users to change it).
      
    * How does this service affect spam? Probably not a lot, but people will
      be concerned. This Berkeley.EDU server might be a good place to put
      Trend Micro VirusWall.
      
    * How will this affect CalNet's "friendly name" idea? We may wind up
      wagging the dog if we get there first (they might use our namespace). At
      this point we probably should proceed without overt concern for CalNet
      friendly names (since they may not happen at all), but Lucia should keep
      us in the loop on developments there.
      
    * How do we handle the transition to the Online Alumni Community? Do we
      forward mail from @Berkeley.EDU to @calalum.Berkeley.EDU? Do we just move
      the name over and stop services to the old name after some grace period?
      We could change the name to firstname_lastname_2001 or some such. What
      about students who don't graduate?
      
    * What about retiring staff and faculty?

    * Perpetuality: My opinion is, we shouldn't reserve a particular name unless
      we're still providing services to that name. We need to decide if we will
      leave the name active in @Berkeley.EDU or move it over. Since this
      service is going to be closely integrated with CalNet, it will be
      difficult to provide it to people who aren't in the CalNet directory. We
      also need to avoid providing it to people who are in the CalNet directory
      who are not primary Berkeley.EDU people. This is a bigger problem the
      more people wind up with CalNet ID's. (Like contractors, for example).
      How quickly does CalNet purge alumni/departed staff? Fairly quickly
      because of I-Planet license restrictions, or so we hear.
      
    * Do we care about the uclink/socrates namespace? The continuum extends
      from using uclink account names exclusively, to completely ignoring them.
      In between, possibly we could reserve the name space if a uclink user has
      it. Mike notes that someone who has jones@cchem might question why
      jones@uclink gets preference. Maybe free-for-all is fairer.
      
    * Lucia should tell us about some of the CalNet issues next week; we don't
      have a good grasp of what information is in the database, or can be added.
      
    * What kind of hardware will we need? Probably not a lot, some 1U rack-mount
      Pentium servers, at least two to begin with. The service should be
      easily scalable (Mike).
      
    * Homework: We'll discuss some of these issues on the mailing list. It's
      hard to reach consensus through e-mail, so we'll try to meet weekly for
      at least the next few weeks; we'll play it by ear after that.
      

    Thanks to everyone who participated. I'll see you next week.

    -- 
    Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069)
    College of Letters & Science
    249 Campbell Hall
    



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