- Built the Solaris infrastructure
- Started building up some networking skills
- Created a Jumpstart server and all the support configurations
- Trained users and colleagues on using and supporting the new environment
- Continued to expand my web development skills by re-implementing a service desk tracking system
- Taught myself Perl and SQL
After having some time in at NetAccess, I moved on to a contract position at Xerox. That contract eventually changed into a direct-hire position, so I am combining those two in here.
The particular group I was hired into was using SunOS and needed to transition to Solaris while still supporting SunOS. The current staff didn’t have time to do both, hence I was hired.
I build the Solaris environment up from nothing, making sure to still retain access to files and services that were in the SunOS environment where needed. This was a decent sized task, but there weren’t any major parts that could have gotten broken along the way. This is a bonus of building a new site. 🙂
Once we had the core services up and running, we slowly moved everyone over and brought them up to speed on what was different. This also included my colleagues who had the time as the count of SunOS systems dropped off.
Once things were stable (I was a direct hire by then), I set off to rebuild our service desk tool. What we had been using was a in-house system that was web based but used a bash shell to modify entries within a text file. To give you an idea, each line of text was a ticket that included a lot of information….enough that the line length was frequently exceeded.
With a nod from management, I wrote the new tool using Apache, Perl, and PostgreSQL. Why didn’t I use PHP and MySQL? They were just starting to show up and were not even close to being production ready in my opinion. For example, MySQL was only about 2 years old.
Sidebar: There’s one thing about this that I’m particularly proud of. There was a sister organization of ours in Xerox called PARC…the Palo Alto Research Center. (That’s the site where window environments on computers was seen by Steve Jobs.) When they caught wind of the tool I had written, they requested a copy for their own use (which we provided). To my knowledge, the only changes they made on it (besides site specific ones) was to add functionality to allow someone to send email and open up a ticket by that method.
After writing that tool and most of the position became support. I continued that until life decided that the salary wasn’t sufficient (read: Student Loans) and I needed to find something else, so I did.
Don’t worry Xerox…we’ll meet again. 🙂