And we're done...
After 13 years, I've finally left my office permanently and my notice is handed in. I am feeling strangely melancholy about it all.
I had been strangely proud of our office. People would walk in the door, (which had the three eyed smiley face from the movie Evolution on it) stop, look around in a mix of awe and confusion and nine times out of ten go "This is what an IT room should look like".
Since I stopped working there full time at the beginning of the year it has been getting progressively cleaner and more dull. Today when I left, it was down to almost completely bare white walls and three desks, but I have photos of what it use to look like.
This is what people would see when they walked in the door. My desk was on the left behind the set of shelves. Work mate's desk was diagonally opposite me, which puts it on the right of the photo, behind the cow. The opposite desk on the left is from where there were three of us, but when this photo was taken, we were down to two. (The day after this photo, we were down to one for three months)
It does look chaotic, but notice how everything is on shelves, or in boxes or in set locations.
This is looking from my desk. Yes, notice how there is only one working monitor on my desk. It is also a 19" 4:3 ratio monitor. I upgraded it to a 24" widescreen earlier this year just to shut my boss up. I don't like dual monitors. I prefer to have a second monitor plugged into whatever I am working on. I alt-tab a lot. I had to look on the original, but there are 16 putty sessions open there and 14 tabs in my browser.
On the walls, the only thing left on them now is the Ice Age banner. I even think the calendar has been taken down. The wooden set of shelves in front of my desk went about 6 weeks ago as did all the shelving and cupboards on the other side. There are now the three grey desks and that is about it.
This was my workmate's sculpture of heatsinks. Also notice the BNC connectors. This was the second collection after the first later one mysteriously disappeared. The horse in the background was part of my Melbourne Cup hat from about 2006.
This is the processor board. The idea was to have one of each type of processor on it. We got pretty close. I actually found a 286 processor when I was cleaning up today and it has a lot more on it now too. It is currently sitting on the back seat of my car. So many people would come in and stare at it and then ask questions. One of the most common was "So this is what a processor looks like?" Which was kind of scary considering the School.
I'm going to miss the room. These photos were taken in 2011 right when I think we had everything humming nicely, although I think we hit our peak of the IT experience around 2009. In 2009 and into 2010 the School I was in merged with the greater Faculty and we centralised IT. Our IT manager then, nice guy, but no idea how things worked. He was another IT support guy, but not one with a complicated IT setup (I know this because I did their support for 2.5 years when I started). He bought the infamous all-in-ones. There is one in the photos. Notice, one is an imac, the other is not.
They were the signs things had begun to change. Brand new machines to replace our 3 year old lab machines... except our 3 year old machines could do a linux compile faster. Yeah, we replaced 3 year old machines with new ones that were slower.
In early 2012 I think IT at the Uni began to take a steep turn downhill. The University central IT began a big project to "enhance the student IT experience" There were three main criteria that affected us. Students needed to be able to log onto any system in any lab using the same username and password; They needed to be able to access their data from anywhere on campus and they needed to be able to print.
Printing actually worked quite well, the Uni took it over, dedicated print server, new printers and make printing so expensive that the students buy their own printer from Officeworks and print at home.
Now, to us, having students logging in from anywhere using a same username and pasword was trivial. We had been doing it for years. We ran a sync to a server central IT provided, that allowed us to cache responses locally, we could then authenticate students to Windows, Linux and OSX. Worked fine, had been doing it for about 5 years.
The solution was to put in a new Active directory. For some reason, someone decided to make it an authoritative source for information, so they imported every staff and student number into it. We have around 20k students, say 15k staff and allow 5k for overhead... The AD has over 250k entries in it. That list gets parsed every time someone logs in... Logins blew out from seconds to minutes. We were told that a two minute wait while logging in was acceptable. We were getting waits of up to five minutes when it was being tested. When semester started and the system got loaded, twenty minute waits were not uncommon.
The other key thing was accessing data. The original brief said just that, students must be able to access the same repository from anywhere. To us, not a problem. Everyone has the same username and password, make up a big box somewhere, then use Samba for Linux and Windows and everyone is happy. Throw on a web service and you can access it from outside via the net.
No, it was interpreted as students would have a single home directory across campus. The same home directory for Linux and Windows. This is doable, but not recommended; Linux and Windows have different security permissions, you loose a lot of flexibility and control. But rather than making Linux the default file system and sharing it out via Samba, they went the other way and made a native NTFS file system which they shared out via NFS in something called a mixed mode.
To say it was a disaster was an understatement. The backend box kept trying to translate Linux permissions into Windows and vice-versa. You can't, they simply don't match up. You could log into Linux, do a listing of your home area and your files would be owned by nobody:daemon with a permission of 000, but you'd still be able to write to them... unless you had a program which actually checked the permissions, then it would be denied because the system said you didn't have access to them.
I suspected 2012 was going to be bad so I disappeared on long service leave for four months expecting all the problems to be resolve by the time I got back. They weren't. One of my first jobs on returning was to set up a replacement NFS server because our Linux systems were simply unusable. Things improved slightly in 2013. We're currently running on a dedicated Linux filesystem for Linux and a separate one for Windows, but the plan is to migrate back to a single one. I'm glad I'm not going to be there for that.
This I suppose leads me to one of my reasons for leaving. We use to offer some amazing levels of service and quality in our IT. However, in the last few years a lot of what we do is being dictated to us from elsewhere. When I started, we ran everything. Now we run the labs, but they authenticate to central servers; they mount central filesystems; they print to central printers. The network is ours, but the firewalls are not. DNS and DHCP are all central. What use to be a problem with a failed service now requires help desk tickets, confirmation, escalation and probably a change request. What use to take ten minutes, we're now talking about how fast it is if it can be done in three hours.
I probably would not mind so much if what was being offered as a central system was good, but it is not. Ask anyone in our School and they'll tell you the level of service has gone downhill. It is not the fault of local IT, it is because we're now having to use systems that are outside of our control. I have become adept at finding the little loopholes to get around things to make things work. I'm sure it is going to make people curse me one day, but eh, I'm not there any more, I don't mind, but I suspect it will take me a while to stop taking it personally.
Like I said in the cut, I'm going to miss the room. 13 years is a long time to be in one place, but onwards to bigger and better things... I hope :)
I had been strangely proud of our office. People would walk in the door, (which had the three eyed smiley face from the movie Evolution on it) stop, look around in a mix of awe and confusion and nine times out of ten go "This is what an IT room should look like".
Since I stopped working there full time at the beginning of the year it has been getting progressively cleaner and more dull. Today when I left, it was down to almost completely bare white walls and three desks, but I have photos of what it use to look like.
This is what people would see when they walked in the door. My desk was on the left behind the set of shelves. Work mate's desk was diagonally opposite me, which puts it on the right of the photo, behind the cow. The opposite desk on the left is from where there were three of us, but when this photo was taken, we were down to two. (The day after this photo, we were down to one for three months)
It does look chaotic, but notice how everything is on shelves, or in boxes or in set locations.
This is looking from my desk. Yes, notice how there is only one working monitor on my desk. It is also a 19" 4:3 ratio monitor. I upgraded it to a 24" widescreen earlier this year just to shut my boss up. I don't like dual monitors. I prefer to have a second monitor plugged into whatever I am working on. I alt-tab a lot. I had to look on the original, but there are 16 putty sessions open there and 14 tabs in my browser.
On the walls, the only thing left on them now is the Ice Age banner. I even think the calendar has been taken down. The wooden set of shelves in front of my desk went about 6 weeks ago as did all the shelving and cupboards on the other side. There are now the three grey desks and that is about it.
This was my workmate's sculpture of heatsinks. Also notice the BNC connectors. This was the second collection after the first later one mysteriously disappeared. The horse in the background was part of my Melbourne Cup hat from about 2006.
This is the processor board. The idea was to have one of each type of processor on it. We got pretty close. I actually found a 286 processor when I was cleaning up today and it has a lot more on it now too. It is currently sitting on the back seat of my car. So many people would come in and stare at it and then ask questions. One of the most common was "So this is what a processor looks like?" Which was kind of scary considering the School.
I'm going to miss the room. These photos were taken in 2011 right when I think we had everything humming nicely, although I think we hit our peak of the IT experience around 2009. In 2009 and into 2010 the School I was in merged with the greater Faculty and we centralised IT. Our IT manager then, nice guy, but no idea how things worked. He was another IT support guy, but not one with a complicated IT setup (I know this because I did their support for 2.5 years when I started). He bought the infamous all-in-ones. There is one in the photos. Notice, one is an imac, the other is not.
They were the signs things had begun to change. Brand new machines to replace our 3 year old lab machines... except our 3 year old machines could do a linux compile faster. Yeah, we replaced 3 year old machines with new ones that were slower.
In early 2012 I think IT at the Uni began to take a steep turn downhill. The University central IT began a big project to "enhance the student IT experience" There were three main criteria that affected us. Students needed to be able to log onto any system in any lab using the same username and password; They needed to be able to access their data from anywhere on campus and they needed to be able to print.
Printing actually worked quite well, the Uni took it over, dedicated print server, new printers and make printing so expensive that the students buy their own printer from Officeworks and print at home.
Now, to us, having students logging in from anywhere using a same username and pasword was trivial. We had been doing it for years. We ran a sync to a server central IT provided, that allowed us to cache responses locally, we could then authenticate students to Windows, Linux and OSX. Worked fine, had been doing it for about 5 years.
The solution was to put in a new Active directory. For some reason, someone decided to make it an authoritative source for information, so they imported every staff and student number into it. We have around 20k students, say 15k staff and allow 5k for overhead... The AD has over 250k entries in it. That list gets parsed every time someone logs in... Logins blew out from seconds to minutes. We were told that a two minute wait while logging in was acceptable. We were getting waits of up to five minutes when it was being tested. When semester started and the system got loaded, twenty minute waits were not uncommon.
The other key thing was accessing data. The original brief said just that, students must be able to access the same repository from anywhere. To us, not a problem. Everyone has the same username and password, make up a big box somewhere, then use Samba for Linux and Windows and everyone is happy. Throw on a web service and you can access it from outside via the net.
No, it was interpreted as students would have a single home directory across campus. The same home directory for Linux and Windows. This is doable, but not recommended; Linux and Windows have different security permissions, you loose a lot of flexibility and control. But rather than making Linux the default file system and sharing it out via Samba, they went the other way and made a native NTFS file system which they shared out via NFS in something called a mixed mode.
To say it was a disaster was an understatement. The backend box kept trying to translate Linux permissions into Windows and vice-versa. You can't, they simply don't match up. You could log into Linux, do a listing of your home area and your files would be owned by nobody:daemon with a permission of 000, but you'd still be able to write to them... unless you had a program which actually checked the permissions, then it would be denied because the system said you didn't have access to them.
I suspected 2012 was going to be bad so I disappeared on long service leave for four months expecting all the problems to be resolve by the time I got back. They weren't. One of my first jobs on returning was to set up a replacement NFS server because our Linux systems were simply unusable. Things improved slightly in 2013. We're currently running on a dedicated Linux filesystem for Linux and a separate one for Windows, but the plan is to migrate back to a single one. I'm glad I'm not going to be there for that.
This I suppose leads me to one of my reasons for leaving. We use to offer some amazing levels of service and quality in our IT. However, in the last few years a lot of what we do is being dictated to us from elsewhere. When I started, we ran everything. Now we run the labs, but they authenticate to central servers; they mount central filesystems; they print to central printers. The network is ours, but the firewalls are not. DNS and DHCP are all central. What use to be a problem with a failed service now requires help desk tickets, confirmation, escalation and probably a change request. What use to take ten minutes, we're now talking about how fast it is if it can be done in three hours.
I probably would not mind so much if what was being offered as a central system was good, but it is not. Ask anyone in our School and they'll tell you the level of service has gone downhill. It is not the fault of local IT, it is because we're now having to use systems that are outside of our control. I have become adept at finding the little loopholes to get around things to make things work. I'm sure it is going to make people curse me one day, but eh, I'm not there any more, I don't mind, but I suspect it will take me a while to stop taking it personally.
Like I said in the cut, I'm going to miss the room. 13 years is a long time to be in one place, but onwards to bigger and better things... I hope :)