Priorities

1. Communication
2. Support
3. Security
4. Maintenance
5. Services
6. Innovation

Practices

Communication

• Activity Notes

  Post as Journal to the ITECS/Systems Activity Log (except for personnel/security comments) Email Journal permalink to Jason Young, with additional private comments

• Subcommittee Notes

  Make observations from subcommittee meetings available to engr-sysadm (the goal is reporting back as a representative of Engineering on a campus committee to those represented, not to become the subcommittee's recorder)

• Reading

  • Get an RSS aggregator
  • Stay up with the ITECS/Systems syslog
  • Spend at least an hour a week staying up with service developments in the area(s) you are responsible for.

Support

• Renewed focus on Remedy calls

  • Response Time - within a half day, response back to customer within a day

    (if necessary: faster for priority calls)

  • Checking calls twice a day

  • Daily call updates for ongoing calls (or a scheduled next update time)
• Availability
  • You will use Jabber
  • Except for a dedicated “project time” - you should be in the engr-sysadm chat room
  • Two 1-1.5 hour helpdesk sessions a week

Security

• Peer Review of Applications and Services
• Continued push for Encrypted transfers
• Keeping up with Security sources
• No repeat of the Harvard Business School

Maintenance

• Develop a “Morning Routine” (and/or “Afternoon Routine”)

  • Become available in Jabber
  • Check/Act on Remedy
  • Check/Act on Sysrootmail
  • Check/Act on Server Logs (project)

• Quarterly Updates of all relevant service software on our servers

  • Web: OS, Apache, PHP, Mysql Client,Awstats; DB: OS, Mysql; ... etc.

• No more “reinstall breakage”

• Root mail should go to the shared mailbox(es)

• Logs

  • All important logs under logrotate
  • You should be able to identify log events

• All cronjobs documented

• All servers should be updated in ServerTrack or something suitable

• Keep Server Rooms clean
  • All servers should be labeled front/back
  • All cables should be labeled

Services

ITECS/Systems Services

• License Management
• Application Deployment
• HTTP
• Database
• Jabber
• Email
• Monitoring
• Storage

ITECS/Systems Service Areas

• Admin Desktop
• Admin Services
• Owned Computing
• Targeted Labs
• Remote Access
• Instruction
• Peer Support
• Systems Support

Graphic: Building a matrix of services to service areas

Innovation

Graphic: Combining Services to affect multiple service areas

Projects

An Engineer seeks by design to create an optimal solution to a problem

(see the handout from Dr. Frank Abrams or my commentary on this subject )

• Define the Problem
• Gather information about how it might be solved (or might have already been solved)
• Generate candidate solutions
• Analyze candidate solutions
• Select solution
• Plan the implementation
• Implement the solution
• Test the solution
• Learn/Generalize about the solution (Documentation)