Summer wrap-up

Since I am home sick today and the summer is almost over I thought I’d recap all I did at work this summer.

1. The 15th annual CIT conference was held at Fredonia this year. I had the opportunity to not only work as tech support for the conference but also to do a presentation as well. I really enjoyed being able to give a presentation there and have it so well received. The tech support side of things was hectic of course. Between the prep, which included procuring various software packages that were requested and imaging the labs for the conference, and the actual conference, with all the running around that entailed, we were kept very busy.
2. The 122 Houghton lab was renewed this year. Because of CIT we had to get the new equipment in pretty quickly. Steve, Tom, Vince, and myself cleared the room and installed all the new computers, monitors and printers. I made a basic image for the conference. I think we set a record for tearing down and setting up a lab, but we got it done on time and it was worth it. We also got our projector installed in record time too because we needed it for the conference.
3. The summer is a good time to catch up on various maintenance on the 5 servers I administer, so I did that as well. Clearing out old files, purging logs, etc.
4. Every semester the print quota system needs to be reset and statistics and trends need to be compiled. So that was done at the beginning of the summer and will be done again this week since the semester starts on Monday.
5. I administer our automated system prep, which needed to be updated to include newer software versions/updates.
6. We are migrating to a new version of antivirus and I worked on creating install and upgrade scripts to ease the transition.
7. New images needed to be created and deployed to all 5 of my labs for the Fall semester. Even though there were several setbacks I completed this on schedule.
8. Our new ticket tracking software needed to be moved off of an old server onto the application server I administer. There were a few tricky parts to that, but it is fully operational now.
9. Documentation for our email migration needed to be compiled, and in some cases written or re-written, and moved to it’s new location.
10. As I’ve mentioned previously in this blog I’ve been testing Vista and Office 2007.
11. Of course there were the numerous HelpDesk support calls that were handled as well.

I have a feeling that I am leaving things out, but you get the general idea. Summers are always busy. It’s amusing/frustrating when people assume that since I work at a college that I spend my summers sitting by the pool sipping mimosas. We are busy all year long, we just have better weather in the summer. ^_^