Present: Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Mary Ellen Birkett, John Brady, Eric Brewer, John Davis, Gary Felder, Jamie Hubbard, Thomas Laughner, Eric Loehr, Roisin O’Sullivan, and Melissa Choyce
Absent: Herb Nickles
Approval of October 21st minutes
The October 21st minutes were approved with edits regarding the technology & seminar rooms as well as deleting for now the sub-committee on Moodle. Connie will make those edits and redistribute the corrected October minutes.
Tom Laughner introduced Melissa Choyce to the members of the committee and she was welcomed as the student representative to CET.
Passwords & Password Security – Ben Marsden
Jamie Hubbard told the committee that he currently has 12 passwords for his various accounts and in order to manage them he has turned to Password Manager. He said that he feels Smith’s requirement to change passwords every six months promotes worst practices. Ben Marsden, Director of Systems & Networks, was invited to this CET meeting to explain Smith’s requirements and why they are important.
Ben explained that passwords protect “at risk” information such as ID theft, FERPA regulations, financial information, and institutionally sensitive information. Our LDAP password authentication protects Novell, Groupwise, Moodle, network access control, federated access, our public access computers, and the Pharos pay for print. Banner is not included in the LDAP realm and should be separately password protected. John Davis noted that currently the interlibrary loans are not LDAP authenticated but that it would be more convenient if they were.
Ben said that our current policy is to change the LDAP password every 180 days in order to protect the whole system and that to extend that period would show lack of due diligence to protect Smith data in his opinion as well as in the opinion of the Smith College auditors.
Roisin asked if there was good open source password management software that could be keyserved and made available to Smith faculty, staff, and students. The committee agreed that this was a good idea and Ben said that he could look into it.
CET grant initiatives
1) Margaret Bruzelius requested funding to purchase 5 copies each of Cyberlink DVD and Inspiration software. Her request was approved for $547.00.
2) Bob Burger requested funding to purchase inverse modeling software to replace outdated software. The request was approved for $1994.00 with the understanding that future upgrades must be budgeted through the department.
3) Bob Burger requested funding to purchase real time environmental monitoring displays and two Macs to run the displays. The committee wondered if this was pedagogy or publicity and denied the request because it was not what they felt was an appropriate use of CET funds.
Other agenda items
John Brady asked if there were other available feeds that would be helpful beyond the RSS feed for EDigest.
There was also a brief discussion about whether there is any difference between using the email address smith.edu or email.smith.edu. At this time there should be no difference and the Systems group is trying to move everything toward just using smith.edu.
The next meeting will be December 16th in Stoddard Hall G4 conference room.
Respectfully submitted,
Constance McGinn, recorder