The first Geography Department Computer Room, formerly the Departmental Map Library, was officially opened towards the end of 1996. Computer Room 1 (as it is now colloquially known) was built with four rows of benches with space for four machines on each. The room also contains an instructor's machine connected to a projector. Computer Room 1 was mainly intended as a teaching room, but it is also heavily used between classes by students working on projects etc. Given that class sizes generally tend to be in the 15-20 range, it is essential that all machines are working at all times. It is also desirable that they should all behave in a similar manner - i.e. it is important that they should not be 'personalised' by students interfering with the settings. It became obvious at an early stage that the room would need to be tightly managed. I was appointed as the Departmental Computer Room Manager. Later, when the number of machines in the Department rapidly began to multiply, my role was redesignated as Computer Facilities Manager and I assumed a limited role for the maintenance of machines in staff offices and postgrad rooms.
Given that we did not have the luxury of a technician to fix things when they went wrong until May 2002, the management strategy was by necessity geared towards preventing problems rather than fixing them after they occurred. One line of defence was to confine access to the teaching room to postgraduate students who had a vested interest in ensuring that the machines were working for classes. All students wishing to use the facilities had to agree to a set of rules designed to minimise the risk of damage to the machines. They were also assigned a swipe card required to gain access to the room. To compensate for the deficiencies in the Windows 9x security systems, I wrote a management suite of programs to block access to non-authorised users. Also, in the event of problems developing, the log files created by the management suite enabled us to identify who was using the machine at the time when the problem developed, check what they were doing (usually something totally innocent) and then take steps to ensure similar problems did not arise again.
The machines were initially maintained separately - i.e. problems were manually fixed on each machine as they arose. This was a nightmare. Fortunately we discovered at an early stage how to create an image of the software on a master machine and then 'Ghost' it over the network to other machines using software developed by Symantec. This converts each machine into an exact clone of the master machine, so some further adjustments were required to make each machine distinguishable to the network (e.g. changes to the IP settings). This was accomplished by running a small 'personalised' batch file for each machine. Ghosting allowed us to restore corrupted software on a machine in about 15 minutes. It also allowed us to update software on a regular basis with minimal effort.
The machines in Computer Room 1 were completely replaced in 1999. This was quite a change from the situation in the early 1990s when purchasing even one machine was regarded as a major achievement - presumably one of the spin-off benefits of the Celtic Tiger. Twelve of the machines from Computer Room 1 were transferred to a tutorial room (now referred to as Computer Room 2) where they could be accessed by authorised users. There is less pressure on the machines in Computer Room 2 for teaching purposes, so it did not matter too much if all the machines were not working at any given instant. Access to Computer Room 2 was therefore less restrictive than to Computer Room 1. The machines were also less actively maintained. This, combined with their relative antiquity, meant that at any given time there was usually something wrong with at least one or two of them. This, however, was oddly consoling as it suggested that the tremendous effort put into ensuring all the machines in Computer Room 1 were working at all times was in fact justified.
A further batch of machines were purchased for Computer Room 1 in the summer of 2002, although they were not installed until the Christmas break of that year due to technical difficulties. We were led to believe that the new machines were incompatible with the older Windows 9x operating systems, so we installed Windows 2000. However, the more advanced security features within Windows 2000 made the whole process of Ghosting much more complex. Having cloned a machine it now became necessary to remove all the security identifiers (SIDs) throughout the entire system, boot each machine to generate a new set of SIDs, and then join each machine to the requisite network domains to enable the new SIDs to be recognised. Sounds simple, but it took quite a lot of time figuring out what the problems were and then creating a system to automate the process. We also lost the benefits of our own management suite as I was unable to get information on the system calls required to kill a machine under Windows 2000 in the event of an illegal intrusion, so our login system could now be easily bypassed by the more imaginative hackers. Anyway the new machines were eventually installed in Computer Room 1 at Christmas 2000, and the machines that had previously been there were moved to Computer Room 2.
I stepped down as the Computer Facilities Manager at the end of 2002.
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