- Provided support for email access (servers, client, and web interfaces)
- Automated the mailing list creation for classes
- Assisted mailing list owners with management of lists
- Configured VMware environment and templates
- Trained colleagues on using VMware services
- Provided backup network support
- Implemented printing accounting packages and supporting scripts
- Implemented scripts to provide student information to web portal
- Built a Certificate Authority for the campus
Another friend of mine worked within the SUNY system for many years and let me know about this position at SUNY Geneseo. It was a Systems Administrator position and was a good fit…except everyone was very pigeon-holed. Everyone had things that they were responsible for and you didn’t really learn anything new unless it was a new project. This isn’t an entirely bad thing when starting out, but with my past experiences, it did get a little stifling after a while. However, in the mean time I did bring about a fair number of positive changes.
The primary responsibility when I started was mail servers. While there were four people on the team, only one had solid knowledge of the mail servers, and that’s because he was a backup for my predecessor. So once I started, getting up to speed on the mail services was the primary focus. This included the mail delivery service (Exim), the web front-ends (SqurrelMail), client applications (there were many), and mailing list management (using Mailman). I also picked up responsibility for the SPAM firewalls (from Barracuda Networks) when we settled on what to use.
While picking up experience with the other services we supported, we also started investigating server virtualization. I took this as a focus as well and delved into it pretty deeply. Ultimately, I setup the templates that we used for servers as well as providing some documentation for others to use.
I worked with our network manager on multiple occasions to make sure that the network between our server rooms worked properly. This included not just server communications, but also SAN communications, VMware migration functionality, and everything else needed to keep the site up and running 24/7.
At the time, services like Google Drive and Dropbox were not available. Students had space on a file server on campus and could easily run out of space if they weren’t careful. I wrote scripts to query usage information via SNMP queries against our NetApp SANs. These queries would return the usage for display within the webmail portal as well as the student information portal that was under development. Making this information accessible resulted in a reduction of calls to the service desk.
I also created a Certificate Authority and supporting infrastructure. We used this to reduce costs for certificates for services that only members of the campus community would be accessing.
After a few years and the lack of growth potential, I started looking around for other opportunities, and one came from SUNY Brockport.