In support of our contracted systems, CUSG operates and maintains
a number of services behind the scenes.
Monitoring
For all our supported Workstation and Server systems,
we make a twice-daily ping check, to see if the system is online; this can
help us notice problems before they are even reported.
For systems on a Server support contract, we monitor their status using
Xymon monitoring software. We are alerted
quickly whenever there is a problem with monitored services or systems.
Unix Support
We have customized code to facilitate network installations of Solaris and Linux.
For Solaris, we maintain a "Jumpstart Server" with Solaris 10 images, and
numerous scripts to aid in setting up a fully-patched Sun for our environment.
For Linux, we have prepared "Kickstart" installations for RedHat and CentOS.
Our linux machines are kept up-to-date with patching through the use of
yum-updatesd.
Our Solaris machines get periodic installations of Sun's Recommended & Security
patch clusters. And all of our unix/linux machines get special attention in the
event of critical security patches.
We also configure them to run CUSG-customized scripts every hour, which enable
them to pull down configuration updates.
Finally, we set up our Solaris and Linux machines to centrally syslog to one of
CUSG's own servers, and we routinely monitor the logged messages.
Windows Support
We make use of IDSG's Windows Deployment Service when possible, to allow network
installation. Once a machine becomes a member of the CUSG Organizational Unit (OU)
in the EECS Active Directory, our group policies can help automatically install
some standard software, as well as important system configuration.
To keep our Windows clients securely patched, we use
Windows Server Update Services by Microsoft.
