How many administrators needed per site?

[Ed Anselmo]

Yale Computer Science has a Facility composed of 1 Facility Director,
1 Manager of Development, 2 Sr. Systems Prog. (I'm one of them), 1
Manager of Operations, 1 Operations programmer, 1 Operations staff.

This is down from 4 Sr. Programmers, 2 Operations programmers, and 2
Operations staff 2 years ago.  And they've cut out the weekend backup
operators too.

We manage about 150 Suns + miscellaneous other machines (Connection
Machine, Intel Hypercube, Encore Multimax, Sequent Symmetry, some
IBM-RT's, IBM RS/6000, DEC-5000's).  Maybe 200 machines in all.

The user community is maybe 600 (undergrads, grads, faculty, and
staff).

I was the sole support person in my last job (5 Suns, 40 IBM-PCs, 10
Macs).  They expected me to do development when I could barely keep
all the machines and printers alive from day to day. Yeah, sure.

>> (1) User Services

Users get daily backups, except on weekends.  A staff person is on
call on weekends for extreme emergencies, otherwise we're a 9-to-5
weekdays operation.

We seem to be fair game for questions on anything that falls under the
"supported" category:  TeX, X, mail, news, networking, etc.  Each the
development staff is at least dimmly aware of every major software
package we support, though "The Other Guy" handles TeX, I field news,
mail, and networking questions, and we split up the X support.

>> (2) Diversity of Arch/OS/Setup

Since CS switched to all Sun Sparcstations, maintenance has become
much easier.  2 years ago, the facility supported 4 workstation
architectures: Apollo, HP, IBM, and Sun.  Now it's pretty much just
Sun, though we just got in 10 DECstations, and a similar number of
Macs.

>> (3) Software Support?

The raging issue amongst the Powers That Be is just what software is
to be supported and at what levels.  At our current staffing level,
it's basically impossible to do feature enhancement; fixing serious
bugs is doable; but mostly, we just install/port the software, and
rely on others to provide us with fixes.

>> (4) Custom Software?

We support several locally written pieces of software, like the
magical software that hides all the userids in CS behind the
"lastname-firstname" alias for the purposes of news and mail, the User
Database program (manages accounts/uids/mailing-lists), the "autodump"
program that manages the file backups, an editor, and a mail reader.

>> (5) Site Planning/Admin Overhead

The facility director gets stuck with this job.

>> (6) Hardware/Network Maintaince

We have on-site Sun hardware support.  Plus a relatively new building
with professionally installed thicknet.  I did my time in the Midnight
Wiring Crew at my last job.  Ugh.

We let our hardware technician take care of most things.  (Thankfully,)
he yells at me when I start poking around the multiports in the comm.
closets.  So I let him do the work.

>> (7) Leading Technology

"I'm reading news so that I can keep up with new technologies.  YEAH,
that's it, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, that's the ticket."
-- 
Ed Anselmo   anselmo-ed at cs.yale.edu   {harvard,cmcl2}!yale!anselmo-ed