NCSU OIT Integration Services

There is a hold-up on getting the permissions correct so that folks in the shs-general paging group can actually get to the proper tools on Sysnews.  Though these will be resoloved and everything put together better, in the short term I've taken the shortcut of adding everybody to the "ITD Microsys" Sysnews group.

I'll move things to a better config when we get our organizational ducks aligned.

We met this afternoon to chat about how we wanted on-call to look, and here's my recolections.  Please post or comment if I've omitted something or just got it wrong.

We have 7 people in the "Windows Services" subgroup, who are responsible for servers running Windows, Netware, and Linux.  The initial 7 are jlgardne, jtjohns4, kmswann2, wtcornet, dlcarrw, jrwells and jaklein.

We had a successfull meeting with Harry this morning, and have an official go ahead to implement our on-call plans.

My to-dos are to call a "cross functional team" to consolidate all of OIT's Active Directories down to just one, and to make sure that the Windows folks have access and introductions to the master station blog.

I didn't take notes, but here's some things that were talked about:

DC00 went to a warning status in nagios today, 'cause it had critical updates.

I installed the following updates, and rebooted the server:

I wanted to confess that I've moved some of the panels about on this site.  We're more or less on a simple 3 panel layout, rather than the 2 we'd been using.

If you don't  like it, and you're in the former "Windows Services" group, you can edit the 'blocks' menu and set it up as you like.

Folks,

 FYI, I've started a skeleton on-call playbook to start sketching out how things might look in a combined Hosted Systems/Citrix/Microsys rotation.  So far, I've got a Windows DC, a Novell Replica, and a Citrix Xenapp page started.  The contents should be considered bogus, these are just sketches of real procedures we'd work out and agree upon.

Symantec Antivirus 10.1.7.7000's memory leak on the parent server side as sever enough that daily reboots was not sufficient. I uninstalled this instance of SAV CE and attempted to reinstall from the primary server. The primary management server was in a different subnet than the targed secondary management server. The attempt to use Symantec System Center to remotely install the secondary management server instance of SAV 10.1.6 would not complete.

When I attempted to install directly from the intended secondary server, the installer would not show the server group.

This morning, Kevin, Jamie and I established a "trust" between the acsad and unity.ad domains. We needed to do this, so that each domain would recognise resources in the other.

There's still a bit of work to do to determine what rights should be assigned, now that the accounts from one domain are recognised by the other.

AdminStudio, the de facto standard for Windows application packaging, costs $3,000 for the standard edition with maintenance.

 In the "too good to be true" vein, there is a product called Advanced Installer, which offers a simple free version. The "professional" version is less than $500. I would like help in determining if it would be an adequate substitute for AdminStudio for most users.

So, if windows services is going to pick up the on-call responsibilities for the ACSAD, here's what I'd propose we do for an on-call rotation.

Let's make sure several folks are on the DieBold mailing list used to decide what patches get applied to the WSUS server. In fact, let's subscribe "windows-services@lists.ncsu.edu" so we all do, as e-mail filtering is your friend, and that way any of us can step in with the proper information should the need arise.