Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Administering a News system part time Message-ID: <7540@e.ms.uky.edu> Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 14:35:07 EDT Article-I.D.: e.7540 Posted: Tue Oct 20 14:35:07 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 21-Oct-87 22:51:09 EDT References: <273@arnold.UUCP> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 55 Keywords: administrate questions hours In article <273@arnold.UUCP> dave@arnold.UUCP (Dave Arnold) writes: >Like I said, the hardware will be a Convergent Technologies Megaframe running >CTIX, with about 80meg of disk space (probably 20-40meg free), and a 1200 baud >modem, a telebit trailblazer looks good for the future. There are about 100 >employee's who will be potential News readers/posters, most of them >programmers. 20-40 free megs is rather slim ... Unless this machine is just going to be a buffer between your internal machines and the rest of the world. (i.e. people don't READ news on this system, they read it on some other system ... this CTIX box can then run with a 1 week expire and be happy). We generally have 20-40 megs tied up here with news articles ... >I recognize the following duties: >1. Create shell accounts as needed. >2. Provide Netnews user documentation as needed. >3. Provide technical support (Hey Dave, how do I send mail to somebody > on DEC's Easynet?). [This is easy nowadays ... the gateways there rewrite the headers to say user@host.dec.com ... then you just get an intelligent mailer that knows the path for a gateway to dec.com and it happens automatically]. >4. Monitor nightly newsfeeds, make sure everything ran smoothly, enough > disk space, etc. >5. Fix problems with network/terminal servers to News system. >6. Review UUNET bill. [Weeell... there isn't much on the UUNET bill to review ... it'd be nice if they put out a listing of the calls you'd made, or possibly just the large ones (or non-prime-time) ones ... but then that's not a proper subject for here ... :-) ] hmmm ... You're putting E-Mail duties in there too. I work SOLEY as news/mail support for 20 hrs/week. The job has grown to the point where I now have a helper who I'm training ... This in a University where it's real hard to hire people to begin with, and in a support group which is fairly understaffed anyway. So we have 30 hrs/week (10 of which is a trainee remember) of work supporting our news/mail system and we're NOWHERE NEAR to catching up with what needs to be done. But then I've got a real complicated system here. Links to BITNET, Internet, UUCP and news being exchanged over all 3 networks. Different exchange methods used on all the 3 networks. Mail going across all 3 networks has different little idiosyncracies. Each of the subsystems I manage is as-large-or-larger than the kernal, and I have to make non-trivial changes sometimes just to get the subsystems to work. Your 16 hrs/week guess is a pretty good guess. Especially if you're new at administrating news/etc. -- <---- David Herron, Local E-Mail Hack, david@ms.uky.edu, david@ms.uky.csnet <---- {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- I thought that time was this neat invention that kept everything <---- from happening at once. Why doesn't this work in practice?