Spring 2006 - COSI for Credit

Goals for the semester

• As co-director my duty is to present cosi in a positive manner by helping those new to COSI, maintain/update/upgrade the lab equipment and software, and teach what I can to others.
• I plan to give multiple presentations to teach new members of COSI about useful and interesting technologies.
• As co-director I will also be giving a presentation at the Spring Open House.
• Since we are planning on using a new distribution for the COSI lab build, I plan on helping with this.
• It is important for someone to learn about the servers and improve upon the current administration of servers. They leave something to be desired and the current person maintaining these servers will be graduating.

Activities of this Semester

• As a student director of COSI I've spent many hours making sure things go smoothly in the lab. I make sure that people have the necessary equipment to work on their project, and I try to be familiar with what people are interested in so I can steer opportunities their way. I made a simple list of old computers so that we could keep track of them for random projects.
• I participated in the Spring Open House as well.
• I've taken the time to learn about mirror. I feel comfortable in maintaining and setting up the server now.
• Earlier in the semester I gave a presentation on pyGTK. I had originally planned on giving multiple presentations, but it didn't pan out as expected.
• Near the end of the semester, there were some major problems with a new server COSI purchased. A lot of progress in configuring the server was lost. As a director, it's my responsibility to take care of large problems. So I figured out what exactly was wrong with the machine, reinstall, and start reconfiguring the computer again. By the way, LVM sucks. Eventually it was required to start talking with customer service and replace a bunch of parts. In having to set our server up again, it was very eductional. I am quite familiar with how it functions, which is important in maintaining it.
• Though I may not have participated in everything, I've made an effort to learn about all the different technologies that hold COSI together. G4U, NFS, RSYNC, SELinux, RHEL, LVM, etc.. And when needed, I would add my effort as well. For example, I am not heavily involved in the lab build, but I try to stay aware of any
• In general I tried to be a presence in COSI. I add my thoughts into conversations and try to share my knowledge with others...

Goals for Next Semester

• Next semester I will be a codirector again with Rouslan.
• I believe it would be extremely beneficial to COSI if the setup and function of servers and COSI equipment were documented. This would definitely decrease the time it takes to learn about everything, and give a good introduction to linux for those who don't have very much experience with it.