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Wayne Hoover was a good candidate for the systems administration
internship at the Center for Bimolecular Science and Engineering
at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He had a year of
previous experience working nearby for the technical support office
for the School of Engineering. His technical support job gave Wayne
many valuable techniques in the computer field, specifically familiarity
with enterprise level network and server hardware. Wayne also had
previous experience with the *nix operating system, which the CBSE
department primarily uses on most of its systems.
Wayne was presented with two main objectives in his internship,
his goal as set by his mentor, Jorge Garcia, was to implement a
power redundancy and backup system across all server and network
components in the CBSE group. This project was huge because of the
many thousands of computers that the CBSE group used; everything
from high performance web servers to a thousand processor computing
node. The work was also highly customized due to the large variety
of computers the power and backup redundancy system was to control.
Wayne had implemented and tested both projects by the end of the
2005-2006 school year. Wayne successfully assessed the situation
and wrote custom software that communicates with the power infrastructure
in the building where the computers are located. When the power
goes out the software then becomes active and starts ordering the
shutdown of other, less important, computing nodes to free up reserve
battery power for the more important server computers; namely, the
webservers which host genome.ucsc.edu.
After writing the software to automate the shutdown of specific
computers, Wayne encountered a problem. A critical analog component
of the power strips that control the status of the computing nodes
were missing for most of the computers, and the only place that
made them were severely damaged by hurricane Katrina. To fix this
problem Wayne quickly researched the internals of the component
and had them custom made by the electronics department in the basement
of the engineering building. By learning to work with other people
that he normally would not work with, Wayne was able to configure
and test the system for power failures. In December 2005, a power
outage struck campus and the power system Wayne put into place saved
the important server computers from shutting down, giving them the
time needed for the power to come back on again without the website
noticing any downtime.
Wayne also had to implement a broad affecting backup system for
the varied computing environment of the group. He successfully deployed
a backup system across 6 clients, 4 raids, and a custom backup server.
His system successfully backups 500GB of data weekly, implementing
many detailed inclusions and exclusions and backup types across
three different operating systems.
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Wayne also completed a leadership course for his
internship, which spanned the entire school year. Through this course
he gained valuable skills in leadership qualities and learned about
how the university power system worked. He learned about how the
university’s financial decisions and considerations, the university’s
future architecture and planning proceeds, how the university’s
library works and operates, among many other things. He was also
a part in the input considerations of many of the high-ranking university
officials who came to present for his class. Through the class Wayne
was also able to network with the other interns, which proved very
valuable for his own work. For example, when the group Wayne worked
for was replacing many of its computers, some were going to be disposed
of in the landfill. By using the resources of the class Wayne was
able to network with the campus-recycling intern and get most of
the computers recycled instead of thrown away.
In the future Wayne plans to peruse a career in a field related
to computer technology. This internship is the most valuable experience
he has had in this field. The skills Wayne has gained through this
internship have given him a great advantage in the job market. But
more importantly, Wayne was able to plan, implement, and successfully
test two very novel problems all while having fun doing it.
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