Siddharth Eswaran - System Administration

I am currently a Systems Administrator at the Department of Computer Science, IIT Delhi along with my batchmate Siddharth Agarwal. I volunteered for this task in January 2008 and have been guided by Prof. Subhashis Banerjee. My I have been involved with Windows® Administration for quite some time and GNU/Linux administration since I came to IIT Delhi (2005). Working as a system administrator, I have had exposure to network services like authorised web access, network authentication, NFS and their deployment.

Our general computing lab (GCL) has roughly 80 machines all running GNU/Linux. We use Kerberos for authentication and NFS for making user homes available on all machines.

My first project as system administrator was to make an infrastructure for installing operating systems on client machines in the lab. We (the other Siddharth and I) set up an network boot and kickstart based OS install facility. We have repositories for Fedora Core 6, Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7 (Gutsy), Ubuntu 8 (Hardy), CentOS, Debian and openSolaris.

To maintain configuration on all of these required us to deploy cfengine, which we couldn't (and till date haven't figured out why :) ), so I wrote a simple configuration monitoring script myself that - exploiting the fact that all machines are running the same OS - maintains configuration (see projects - cfmon). We have recently deployed a 10 TB NetApp® filer for maintaining user homes and we mount it using Kerberised NFS. This shift to NFS-Krb5 from plain NFSv3 was made overnight, seamlessly, using cfmon.

Inspite of our exterme caution, however users seem to have complains about running Matlab, or exceeding their disk quota - partly because they don't check e-mails and partly because they are "afraid". I have made tips-n-tricks pages for windows and linux for those "who like to take safe risks" (whatever that means!!).