Thirty-four years in IT – Swimming with the Itanic (Part 8)
For historical reasons, we were a strong VMS shop. Before they imploded, Digital Equipment treated EDU's very kindly, offering extremely good pricing on software in exchange for hardware adoption. In essence, a college could get an unlimited right to use a whole suite of Digital Equipment software for a nominal ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Swimming with the Itanic (Part 8)
For historical reasons, we were a strong VMS shop. Before they imploded, Digital Equipment treated EDU's very kindly, offering extremely good pricing on software in exchange for hardware adoption. In essence, a college could get an unlimited right to use a whole suite of Digital Equipment software for a nominal ... Read More
Thirty-four Years in IT – Addressing Application Security (Part 7)
In the 2008-2009 period, we finally started to seriously address application layer security in our development group. By that time is was clear that the threat to hosted applications had moved up the stack, and that the center of gravity had shifted towards compromising the web applications rather that the ... Read More
Thirty-four Years in IT – Addressing Application Security (Part 7)
In the 2008-2009 period, we finally started to seriously address application layer security in our development group.By that time is was clear that the threat to hosted applications had moved up the stack, and that the center of gravity had shifted towards compromising the web applications rather that the hosting ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Building out Disaster Recovery (Part 6)
In the mid-2000's, our organization started to get serious about disaster recovery. By that time our core application was an e-learning application that was heavily used (a hundred thousand students on a typical day). That app became critical to our mission. To bootstrap a DR capability we paid consultants for ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Building out Disaster Recovery (Part 6)
In the mid-2000's, our organization started to get serious about disaster recovery. By that time our core application was an e-learning application that was heavily used (a hundred thousand students on a typical day). That app became critical to our mission.To bootstrap a DR capability we paid consultants for what ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – System Administration, Backups, and Data Centers (Part 5)
As a side effect of building and running the backbone, I introduced UNIX systems into what was then a wholly VMS organization. We initially used Linux - roughly from 1994 - 1997, then over the next 20+ years, briefly migrated to Solaris x86, then to Solaris SPARC and back to ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – System Administration, Backups, and Data Centers (Part 5)
As a side effect of building and running the backbone, I introduced UNIX systems into what was then a wholly VMS organization. We initially used Linux - roughly from 1994 - 1997, then over the next 20+ years, briefly migrated to Solaris x86, then to Solaris SPARC and back to ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – Security and firewalling (Part 4)
As a natural fit with running the network my team took on the task of securing the campuses and data centers, starting with firewalling the data centers from the rest of the network. We started fairly simply by just segmenting enterprise-wide servers from networks with users and students and restricting ... Read More
Thirty-four years in IT – The System Office, Novell Directories, and Building a State Backbone (Part 3)
Unfortunately nearly all the work we put into administrative and academic technology had to be abandoned. As a part of a larger initiative across the state, the various colleges and universities were being merged together into a single system that today is know as Minnesota State. In that process our ... Read More
