Andrew Beresford's Blog

Today I managed to get out for a walk with Chris and Dan for some lunch. We popped into the Weston Park Museum for something to eat and then went for a quick wander and took a couple of pictures. It's great to be back in Sheffield, especially when the weather is so good and I can get an hour out at lunch to have a walk about!

One of the first things I have been asked to do is to try and break into the machines. I am in the unusual position of having quite a bit of knowledge about the internal systems from my previous employment at the University but as yet I haven't been given access to much. My task has been to try and see what I can break into. We manage user access to most of our systems centrally but administrator access is managed using a much less formal approach, mainly because it is not a common event to add or remove systems administrators, so the effort involved in trying to formalise it isn't very worthwhile.

So far, the systems are holding up pretty well; I managed to log in to an old server related to the MUSE portal and I managed to gain administrator access to the iceberg HPC cluster without too much trouble. In both cases I managed to get in using old credentials from when I worked here 3 years ago. These don't present an immediate threat to our systems security but it does show an area where we should look to improve the way we manage access.

I've also been getting up to speed with the way our Solaris systems work now. When I left the University we used a fairly traditional approach to running systems. A server would be set up to run specific applications. Now we use features like Solaris Cluster and Solaris Zones to create virtualised servers that allow us consolidate many different applications onto fewer larger servers. This gives many benefits in terms of the way we manage our servers but also lowers the total number of physical machines we have. That has quite a few cost saving benefits for us, partly in terms of saving electricity but also lowering our total maintenance spend, which is a significant part of the total cost of running a server. Over time we are aiming to move more of our services onto Zones. One of the major project we in our team have is to move the servers that run the SAP software to a new cluster of 3 machines. They currently run on 13 power-hungry servers, which at some point we hope to be able to flog back to our supplier! Good for the planet and good for the University!