This will be the first of many posts explaining what I do, and what I’m working on.
Today’s topic is REDWOLF. Redwolf is an in-house home-grown app that maintains the security for the Residence Halls. During the school year every student machine (or device … aka XBOX) that CAN have access to the WOU network is recorded in Redwolf.
While developing Redwolf, we borrowed some design and programmatic ideas from OSU’s opensource project Maintain. I’ve worked some with Chris White from OSU who does a real similar job to what I do here at Western. I’m greatly benefited from his open-handed generosity and wisdom.
In a nutshell, Redwolf allows us to centrally manage and interact with our 10+ residential switches. Security is used (and has been for the past few years) to prevent access by unauthorized users. It also allows us to find out where a problem machine is. Redwolf also has some built in reports allowing us to take statistics and calculate usage.
Last year, I implemented a new package for Redwolf that allowed students to manage their devices. As residents can only have two registered devices (and only one online at any one time…ever) I found that many students desired to have the ability to change from their computer to their XBOX and back again – without needing our help.
This summer, one of my big projects is to update/reconfigure Redwolf so that it can be submitted (as per Travis’ suggestion) to the OSU OSL (Oregon State University Open Source Lab). The most required upgrade is the re-writing of the residential self-management area allowing simpler, quicker access to this excellent tool.
Redwolf is a feather in our cap (our being Residential Computing). It provides us with the power and flexiblity that our very dynamic environment requires.