Well, I’ve finally got time to go over the things I’ve been working on since the start of the year. I’m going to try and make more of an effort to do these entries as it’s useful to jog my memory about exactly what I’ve been up to 
The days and weeks tend to be so hectic that I usually forget what I’ve done.
The first week and a bit of this year were very busy. I was involved in two major tasks that we wanted to get done before the bulk of the users came back, these were migration to a new printing accounting system and the move of files to a new filestore.
The printer accounting move was the first thing that needed doing. We’ve been using a good home grown system (written by a member of the Computer Science department) for many years and it was starting to get a little long in the tooth compared to some of the more modern products on the market. Features that we especially wanted were support for many different printer types, a web interface and easier management functions. After a thourough review process we finally settled on Papercut.
A lot of work was done before the start of term by a quite a lot of technical and user services to try and make the transition as seamless as possible. In the end it went pretty well with the actual import of users only taking a couple of hours compared to the days we thought it might do. We’ve had some interesting problems with some of the Unix queues scattered round the place and found quite a few printers we didn’t think existed Most problems have now been ironed out and the few issues we reported back to papercut are being worked
on.
Moving people from the old filestores of Croft and Compton (old P3 Xeon 500Mhz machines) to our new clustered and quotered system which has storage on the SAN went smoothly. The job wasn’t particularly technical but involved a fair amount of work as I needed to backup all the old data as the end of the day when it wasn’t in use and then restore it before 10am the next morning. Had to do some of the work from home which my other half wasn’t that impressed about
We’re now at the state where Compton has been switched off (it’ll make a good coffee table for someone) and Croft is just waiting on us moving the last tricky department. When they go it’ll free up a lot of space in the machine room which we can populate more efficiently.
The new clustered solution offers much more space than the old servers had (and can be grown on demand) and is much more resilient as the filestore is on a pair of clustered 1850s. This means the chances of an interruption to service are reduced and we can even maintain service whilst patching the machines. From a management point of view having quotas makes our lives much easier as rogue users can no longer fill up entire disk partitions any more!
Once these projects were out of the way I’ve spent my time logging more queries with Sun about Kentmail issues. I’ve mainly been concentrating on Outlook Connector issues and think I’ve finally got to the bottom of why users have been having odd problems writing to shared diaries. The long and short of it is that Connector seems to incorrectly order the ACEs meaning that a deny is applied before the allow in same cases, which is broken. I’ve had some fun convincing Sun of this and I suspect I may now more about how Calendar server works than some of their staff
I’ve also been doing my share of the large amount of Remedy queries we get after a vacation and I’ve been catching up on all the little jobs I’ve been putting off whilst working on the projects. These have included upgrading our monitoring software (Nagios) to the latest version and sorting out the queries that have been emailed to me directly. Sigh.
I’ve even tidied my desk and drawers and found the notes I made when I joined the University as a Helpdesk Operator 6 years ago. Sadly most of the notes are now irrelevant as most of the stuff they refer to has been retired. Oh well
