The main thrust of this term was moving away from manual application installation and into a software lifecycle that provided automatic application installation via GPO. We acquired the AdminStudio product that would allow us to repackage a given application and deliver it to any lab within the domain.

Much of what I have planned is moving away from a duplication of effort and relying more upon main campus IT. Main campus provides DNS, DHCP, firewall services and AD authentication through HOME. We were among the first to opt-in to the new DNS/DHCP/firewall services that were provided.

With that in mind we moved ahead with plans to migrate our DNS infrastructure onto the new Adonis appliances as soon as possible. This involved moving several web domains as well as our Active Directory domain onto this new platform. This was achieved by the start of the summer session.

In addition we started working on plans to migrate the labs out of the main vlan and into their own separate vlan and behind the firewall. The labs provide a glimpse to the end goal of all the work we have been doing:

  • Isolated network
  • Firewall protection
  • Campus hosted infrastructure services
  • HOME authentication
  • Computer Management
  • Application Management

Another large project that commenced was virtualization of servers. Our test environment was a Dell 1850 with 3gb RAM, and a dual core CPU. We opted for the VMware Server product as it was free and could be run on a very stripped down Linux installation. This hardware quite easily supported about 10 Windows based server’s simultaneously.