Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cs.yale.edu!anselmo-ed From: anselmo-ed@CS.YALE.EDU (Ed Anselmo) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: How many administrators needed per site? Message-ID: <28089@cs.yale.edu> Date: 16 Jan 91 23:00:27 GMT References: <1991Jan15.230613.8451@rastro.uucp> Sender: news@cs.yale.edu Organization: Yale University, Dept. of Computer Science, New Haven, CT Lines: 75 Nntp-Posting-Host: bigbird.cf.cs.yale.edu In-reply-to: verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu's message of 16 Jan 91 15:52:35 GMT Yale Computer Science has a Facility composed of 1 Facility Director, 1 Manager of Development, 2 Sr. Systems Prog. (I'm one of them), 1 Manager of Operations, 1 Operations programmer, 1 Operations staff. This is down from 4 Sr. Programmers, 2 Operations programmers, and 2 Operations staff 2 years ago. And they've cut out the weekend backup operators too. We manage about 150 Suns + miscellaneous other machines (Connection Machine, Intel Hypercube, Encore Multimax, Sequent Symmetry, some IBM-RT's, IBM RS/6000, DEC-5000's). Maybe 200 machines in all. The user community is maybe 600 (undergrads, grads, faculty, and staff). I was the sole support person in my last job (5 Suns, 40 IBM-PCs, 10 Macs). They expected me to do development when I could barely keep all the machines and printers alive from day to day. Yeah, sure. >> (1) User Services Users get daily backups, except on weekends. A staff person is on call on weekends for extreme emergencies, otherwise we're a 9-to-5 weekdays operation. We seem to be fair game for questions on anything that falls under the "supported" category: TeX, X, mail, news, networking, etc. Each the development staff is at least dimmly aware of every major software package we support, though "The Other Guy" handles TeX, I field news, mail, and networking questions, and we split up the X support. >> (2) Diversity of Arch/OS/Setup Since CS switched to all Sun Sparcstations, maintenance has become much easier. 2 years ago, the facility supported 4 workstation architectures: Apollo, HP, IBM, and Sun. Now it's pretty much just Sun, though we just got in 10 DECstations, and a similar number of Macs. >> (3) Software Support? The raging issue amongst the Powers That Be is just what software is to be supported and at what levels. At our current staffing level, it's basically impossible to do feature enhancement; fixing serious bugs is doable; but mostly, we just install/port the software, and rely on others to provide us with fixes. >> (4) Custom Software? We support several locally written pieces of software, like the magical software that hides all the userids in CS behind the "lastname-firstname" alias for the purposes of news and mail, the User Database program (manages accounts/uids/mailing-lists), the "autodump" program that manages the file backups, an editor, and a mail reader. >> (5) Site Planning/Admin Overhead The facility director gets stuck with this job. >> (6) Hardware/Network Maintaince We have on-site Sun hardware support. Plus a relatively new building with professionally installed thicknet. I did my time in the Midnight Wiring Crew at my last job. Ugh. We let our hardware technician take care of most things. (Thankfully,) he yells at me when I start poking around the multiports in the comm. closets. So I let him do the work. >> (7) Leading Technology "I'm reading news so that I can keep up with new technologies. YEAH, that's it, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, that's the ticket." -- Ed Anselmo anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu {harvard,cmcl2}!yale!anselmo-ed