Systems
The Systems Group
The CCIS Systems Group is dedicated to maintaining and improving the computing environment in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University.
The Systems Group is responsible for the machines (although not the physical environment) in the three WindowsXP labs and the one UNIX lab in WVH You can look up the hours a lab is scheduled to be open at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/groups/proctors/schedule, although labs may be closed sometimes despite that schedule due to reasons beyond our control.
We maintain a small but growing list of 'HOWTO' documents at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/howto/. Another URL you should check frequently is http://www.ccs.neu.edu/announcements/, which has announcements of changes to the CCIS environment.
Systems Personalities
Systems is presently made up of these groups:
• The Crew
Systems Responsibilities
The Systems group manages the computing environment within the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. The environment consists of roughly a hundred and twenty-five Solaris machines (including both workstations and servers), about a hundred and fifty PCs (mostly from Dell) running Windows XP, and a NetApp F820 fileserver from Network Appliance, Inc.. Other infrastructure includes a tape backup system with a `jukebox' of barcoded tapes, a number of printers, and the networking infrastructure, which includes several 10/100 Ethernet switches and a router, all from Cisco Systems.
We're proud of our work on the computing environment in the College, and we hope you are too! We'd appreciate hearing from you if you find some aspect of our computing environment to be working particularly well in addition to any problems you'd like to report.
Contact Information
If you have any questions, problems, or concerns about the computers or use of computers in the College, we ask that you please send email to us. Our address is systems@ccs.neu.edu.
If you have an immediate concern that cannot be handled by email, please stop by our offices in WVH 310.
Note: Even if you know a particular individual on systems is better able to respond to your particular request, we ask that you always send your mail to systems@ccs.neu.edu rather than directly to the individual. We manage the systems mailing list with a RT: Request Tracker that helps us to keep track and manage incoming requests in an organized manner. You are more likely to get a speedy response if you send it to the group address rather than a single person's email address.
Positions Available
We try to have open positions for co-op students available each semester. However, due to forces beyond our control, this varies from semester to semester and year to year. If you are interested in working with us as a co-op, you should check this page every semester or so.
Papers and Invited Talks
We seem to be constantly striving to develop innovative tools and techniques for managing a large heterogeneous environment such as ours. Since a number of these tools and techniques seem useful to other administrators, we have authored the following papers and given the following invited talks.
| • | Tenwen: The Re-engineering of a Computing Environment |
| This paper is about our year-long effort to build Newnet, a complete replacement for the computing environment. This was Rémy's first challenge when he came to Northeastern. | |
| • | Collaborative Networked Communication - MUDs as Systems Tools |
| This discusses the use of a MUD as a communications mechanism for systems administrators. | |
| • | Managing the Ever-Growing To Do List |
| What do you do when you can't keep up with the list of things you're supposed to do? This paper describes our solution and the software called "Req" we built to help us out. Soft: A Software Environment Abstraction Mechanism. | |
| • | Soft: A Software Environment Abstraction Mechanism |
| The paper describes a method of managing your UNIX environment in a painless and flexible manner. | |
| • | 40 Bosses, 3000 Users, 20 Projects (and a side order of fries)...Managing Computers for Academics |
| A presentation from a joint panel on managing academic environments. | |
| • | If I Could Talk to the Animals |
| An invited talk that examined how the veterinary profession teaches diagnostic skills to its students and the lessons system administrators can learn from their work in this area. | |
| • | SysAdmin, Stories and Signing: Learning from Communications Experts |
| An invited talk that attempted to draw lessons for system administrators on how to better communicate with our clients and peers from other communication experts (storytellers and professional sign language interpreters.) |