Now that I've finished the bulk of my Master of Science program, it's time to consider the next move for the systems. I've made most of the major changes I wanted to coming into this position, now I'd like to make those changes robust. So, the coming year's theme: stability.
I believe we must examine, to achieve the goal of stability, there are four aspects of the systems (in no particular order):
- Network infrastructure
- Server infrastructure
- Security infrastructure
- Information infrastructure
Network Infrastructure: This is the foundation of our systems. In the Department of Computing and Information Sciences, this is a completely uknown quantity. None of our current staff can state with certainty the current network's history or current quality—we just don't know. The students and myself have not been around long enough to know. Our hardware specialist, Earl has been around long enough to know quite a bit, but still doesn't really know the network infrastructure well enough to gauge it's condition. Before we can really begin to guarantee quality anywhere else, we will need to quantify the quality of the network. Once quantified, we will need to address any problems found. This research will begin this month and should be finished by May. At that time, we make any changes we can to stabilize this aspect of our systems.
Server Infrastructure: Work on this aspect has already begun. Our server systems are actually in fairly good shape, but still require tweaking to bring the system completely into the 21st Century. We'll be moving to a new web server, the old web server will be handling email services, other services will be moved around, and our obsolete hardware will be retired or placed on standby to be retired in the future. Most notably, our Solaris fleet is made entirely of computers that were never meant for server use and reached End-Of-Life years ago. If we're to continue our use of Solaris, new servers must be purchased. Solaris used to be our flagship system because Sun offered such great support. Yet, as of now, the support offerings from Sun don't look to be that compelling, in my opinion.
Another notable aspect of this issue, is the problem of file services on our systems. For the duration of my time in the Systems Coordinator position, we have been plagued with NFS problems. I intend to resolve this via one of several solutions. The first solution is to attempt to remove the current Solaris NFS server from our systems. It seems to be a major cause of problems on our Linux workstations (it's actually got to be a bug on Linux, but a probable work-around is to remove the Solaris NFS server). This should solve the current stability issues.
Security Infrastructure: Account management and authentication was a major focus of my M.S. Report. These were, really, the largest changes I have implemented on our systems. These have resulted in the most significant discomfort to users as well. Hopefully, most of the pain associated with these changes has ended. The account manager has not been fully implemented. During the next few weeks, it will be set in place. This should decrease the amount of effort spent performing account maintenance and allow us to monitor accounts much more closely than is currently possible.
As mentioned above, NFS is a stability problem on our system. However, while the solution given above will resolve the stability problem, it doesn't address the underlying security flaws of the NFS protocol. The NFS protocol itself has irreparable problems that demand it be replaced. This might be as simple as hoping for full NFSv4 support in Linux soon or as complicated as implementing a different file system infrastructure under Linux. This is, as yet, uncharted territory, so more news will come as we further research the issue.
Information Infrastructure: Communication is a major problem for the systems staff. As such, we're looking at better ways to communicate with students and to put a "human face" on what we do. If we can do this, students, staff, and faculty will be more likely to work with us rather than grumble about us. I have a few ideas that range from improving the support web site, to improving our support tracking system, to posting more information in the form of banners and posters in the labs, and even possibly requesting some renovations to Nichols to make the systems staff hallway more accessible.
I think lots of exciting things will happen during the coming year with the services. I hope we can prove our worth to faculty, staff, and students for the next coming year. Consider this an early New Year's resolution. Cheers.
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