News – At-risk slots, Win11 changes, phas-it email (2025 August 5)
Some updates: we will be instituting some ‘at-risk’ slots for IT maintenance; Windows 11 changes are coming, expect to be contacted; and the phas-it@glasgow mailbox is shutting down.
At-risk slots §
We will be instituting some monthly IT ‘at-risk’ time-slots for machine maintenance. These are periods when either the school network, or certain services, may be unreliable as machines are patched and/or rebooted. Typically, these will be for security updates which have to be applied promptly (but short of an emergency), and which may require a machine reboot.
We don't expect to do anything disruptive every month, but if there's work which might cause problems, we will aim to confine it to these periods. The sort of work required is unlikely to take more than a couple of hours.
The times (mornings):
- Unix machines: the second Tuesday in the month
- Windows machines: the last Tuesday in the month
(yes, the second Tuesday is ‘Windows Patch Tuesday’, but we typically don't apply those patches until a little time has passed).
You probably won't notice anything, much of the time, but if this new arrangement is likely to be problematic for you, talk to Norman.
Windows 11 changes §
As you probably know, if you're a Windows user, Windows 10 is going out of support in October this year. There is therefore an imperative (read: an edict from Campus IT Security, with fire and brimstone threatened) that all the Windows machines that can be updated to Win11, should be so updated in fact, by October.
This is a rather intricate process, since it covers laptops, desktops, and machines in both teaching and research labs, not all of which can be updated.
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If you have a school-managed Windows laptop or desktop, expect to be contacted by COSE IT at some point. Our records of what machines are present in the school are patchy (our ‘device management policy’ in the past has been... let's say ‘laid back’), but we should be able to identify most machines which need work.
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We are talking to teaching lab techs about the way to manage this in labs.
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We will have a couple of strategies for research labs, which may include systematically isolating them at a network level, to mitigate the risk of un-updatable machines (which is good practice anyway, and which we have done patchily in the past).
If we overrun much beyond October, Campus IT have talked of taking steps at their network level to isolate machines with the old OS. If time moves on and you haven't been contacted, please let us know (an Ivanti ticket is ideal here) to make sure you won't be inconvenienced by any campus heavy-handedness.
Support routes §
The phas-it@glasgow inbox
...is going. For a couple of years now, the standard mechanism (read: COSE IT doctrine) for raising computing problems has been to raise a ticket in Ivanti, which makes its way to the COSE IT helpdesk (ie, go to https://www.gla.ac.uk/helpdesk, and search for ‘COSE IT’).
In P&A, we have doggedly hung on to the phas-it@glasgow.ac.uk
mailbox, partly because it seems marginally more human than Ivanti.
But with the way the COSE helpdesk has evolved (and is evolving),
messages to this address now risk being missed, or delayed. It now
seems time to grumble, but retire it.
Tickets!
Finally, I'll reiterate that the preferred route for support requests is still an Ivanti ticket. This is in part because the only actual current data about the levels of demand in different schools is derived from the count of tickets. This is somewhat unfair to us in P&A, since the current pattern of tickets from our school is weighted towards more substantial jobs – ‘I need some advice about Condor setup’ is obviously a bigger task than ‘my mouse is broken’ – and the current system doesn't record this.
No-one is (yet) allocating effort in quite such a simple-minded way in practice, and the job queueing should become a little more sophisticated at some point, but right now, more tickets = good!
Norman
2025 August 5
(Edited 2025 August 7, to add exhortations about tickets)