In a lot of ways
that was a set back for both the college and the students. It was many years
before faculty and students would have the functionality we had in 1993.
In the summer of
1995, as the colleges were being merged into what is now Minnesota State, I
decided that since the college was not emphasizing technology as much as before and since I was ready to leave the small town environment, I would move to the system office and see what opportunities would be available
there.
I became a Novell
System Administrator and built out an NDS tree that turned out to be far more
similar to modern directories then what It was to the best practices of the
time. Conventional wisdom was that you divide up your directory by business
unit or business function and create the user, printer file share, and other
and directory objects related to the business unit in the OU for the unit. I
quickly realized that conventional wisdom and the Novell Directory design
guides were wrong. The 'organization hierarchy'
style directory architecture didn't make a whole lot of sense, so I
implemented a relatively flat directory where the only OU's were at a very high
level and only used to categorize types of objects rather than business units,
departments or divisions. The flat directory Is something much closer to what
you'd see today and something like Azure Active Directory.
That directory had continuous up-time - I.E. you could log into the directory - for over a decade. Of course the servers providing services we not always up, but the directory was. :)
Conventional wisdom
isn't always right.
While
troubleshooting a statewide IPX routing problem I realized that In the post
merger chaos, the wide area network was essentially unmanaged. There were
routers all across the state on either 56 kbit circuits or T1's running along
without any active oversight. So I grab the Cisco manuals, taught myself IP
routing, asked a co-worker for the passwords, and started managing the wide
area network.
That meant
physically locating all the routers around the state, documenting circuit
locations and circuit ID's, cleaning up routing tables, cleaning up
configurations, and getting the hardware on common operating system versions.
We also created a common campus network edge design, wrote our own database
driven network monitoring package, combined monitoring and CMDB databases, and
built out a system of thresholds, triggers and alerts to help us keep tabs on
the hundreds of devices and dozens of sites. Written in Perl and leveraging
MRTG, of course.
To help us monitor
the network we push purchased Netscout probes for every site. Because we had
more than 50 probes, and GUI's don't scale well, I dug into the Netscout
management software and figured out that the graphical user interface was just
a skin over the top of some very powerful command line programs. I wrote a package around those programs that
automated the maintenance and monitoring of probes and automatically gathered
'Top N' IP, TCP host and port counters for their network traffic data from the probes. I exposed that data to campuses
so that campuses had a pretty complete view into their network traffic readily
available to them. My idea was that if they knew more about what was happening
on their network, they'd be able to do a better job of running their network,
and most importantly - they'd be able to resolve more of their own problems
themselves. And call me less often.
As the wide-area
network evolved and became more critical to our operation, we had to make
significant investments in bandwidth and availability. Making those investments
on our own without a partner turned out to be very difficult, so we partnered
with the State of Minnesota to leverage our resources and their skills to build
a common statewide backbone usable by all State agencies and our system -
Minnesota State. For nearly twenty years, the State of Minnesota has been the
backbone provider for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. As the State
had already partnered with the University of Minnesota, the three largest
public entities in the state all share a
common state backbone and Internet connection. In the partnership, Minnesota
State benefits from the resources and expertise at the University of Minnesota
and State of Minnesota, allowing us to concentrate our skills on other aspects
of running a state-wide enterprise.
