Problem Tracking Procedures

We have established a wiki page under StatusReport, that is used to track open system administration issues.

This page tracks all known open problems. Progress on the issues on this list will be discussed with the technical staff on a weekly basis (Tuesday afternoons this term).

In order for this mechanism to work, we need your collaboration. If you encounter a problem with the computer systems, you should do the following:

• send mail to help@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca as usual.
• if the problem does not get resolved within a few days, add it to the above wiki page. Make sure you list your name, so we can contact you if necessary. Also specify the help system tracking number. Any entry that makes it by Tuesday around noon will be discussed at our meeting in the afternoon.
• if you have problems or question regarding the wiki, contact Shruthi Achutha (shruthi@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca). Shruthi is not responsible for solving the problem, but she takes care of the tracking, and might be able to tell you the result of the discussion at the weekly meetings.
• once your request to help@cs is addressed, please send Shruthi a note, and remove the entry from the wiki.

In addition to this mechanism, we also have 3 students to fix urgent(!) problems, or perform trivial tasks that would take the technical staff too long to get around to. The three are:

• Tiberiu Popa (stpopa@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca) for Linux
• Tyson Brochu (tbrochu@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca) for Mac
• Ken Rose (kenrose@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca) for Windows

Tibi already has sudo access on the lab's Linux machines, and has been using it for some while to help people out. The exact mechanisms that Tyson and Ken can use to help with Mac and Windows will have to evolve. It is likely that Macs will see Linux-style management at some point. The situation for Windows is more complicated due to registry fun.

We will review this new mechanism after a few months, so if you have any concerns or suggestions, send email to heidrich@csDELETEthisTEXT.ubc.ca, or talk to your supervisor.

-- WolfgangHeidrich - 07 Feb 2006