Chris Peterman's Fall MP551 page

Major: Information Technology
Year: Graduate

Responsibilities:

COSI Lab Build: This semester I took on the responsibility of maintaining the COSI Lab Build. It was an interesting experience as I had to actually take into account the needs of other people instead of just my own. I struggled for a while to find a maintenance system that didn't rely so heavily on ghosting the machines everytime I wanted to make a change. I wound up trying Parallel SSH, which is good for when you don't need to use root commands. I also started writing a basic package installation system that works off of wget and a text file. This system and everything else related to the lab build are documented on The Wiki. Next semester I will continue to maintain the lab build as I look for someone to take it over after I (finally) graduate at the end of next year.
Mirror: As I have for the past few semesters, I again maintained Mirror this semester. Not much to be done seeing as Mirror is in maintenance mode until next semester when a new server for it is build. Things of note are that Fedora Core 10 came out and was mirrored, taking aoedisk to nearly full capacity. Next semester Roger and I will build the new Mirror. We are talking about using Solaris as the OS so we could take advantage of ZFS. This would give us the ability to use RAIDz1 for redundency. In addition, Roger will be taking over Mirror when I graduate next semester. Everything about Mirror is documented on The Wiki

Projects:

IBM Master The Mainframe: This semester I once again (for the 4th year running) took part in IBM's Master The Mainframe competition. I passed Phase 1 and won a t-shirt.
A Month With Vista: In October I got bored with OS X and decided to try something. A month using Windows Vista only. I installed Vista Ultimate on my spare laptop and went into the breach. It wasn't as bad as everyone would have said, and there are features in Vista that I rather prefer over OSX, KDE, or GNOME. A full write up can be found at Azuredreams.

Misc:

Lightning Talks: I gave two Lightning talks this semester; one on Ubiquity, the QuickSilver-like extension for Firefox; and one on Twitter, the microblogging service that is taking the internet by storm.
Open Houses: As usual I helped with the open houses. It's getting a little odd since I won't see the new freshmen next year.