Author Archives: engineeredbybill

Purchasing / Inventory

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Tricia, Joanie and Sarah (a student employee), make up the inventory and purchasing team.

All IT purchasing, as defined in the WOU Purchasing policy, is purchased centrally.  Please submit your purchase request/price request, for either software or hardware, through the purchase request system.

Tricia is the entry point for all purchases.  She would be glad to answer your questions or help you configure your next purchase.  She is available by e-mail at flahert@wou.edu

When there is contract language associated with the purchase, I will work with Darin Silbernagel, Director of Business Services, to modify/confirm an appropriate contract.

Joanie sends the order out for bid.  Three bids are required for all orders over $5,000.  For those vendors that we have not used in the past, a Substitute W-9 form must be filled out.  Lucinda in the Business Office, then enters the new vendor into Banner.  Joanie creates a Purchase Order in Banner.  She will use the funding source you specified in the Purchase Request system.

Sarah un-boxes all the equipment when it arrives, creates and affixes inventory labels and updates the inventory system.

Tricia assigns delivery or installation of software to a technician, using the Service Request system.

Printers-R-Us

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Megan Eichler is a Xerox certified printer technician.  Don’t hesitate to call Megan regarding any of your printer needs.  She maintains HP printers also. 🙂  You can often find her at her desk with a printer completely pulled apart, replacing a failed part in the core of the printer.  With the Xerox certification, Megan has back-line support with the Xerox technicians and the parts department.

Xerox printers that utilize PagePak support, come with an endless supply of ink and consumer replaceable parts.  The PagePak contract includes a $0.0108 per page charge for mono and $0.0355 per page charge for color + a base charge of $13/month.

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Megan repairing Xerox printer

Redundant Data Center Overview

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DeVolder Family Science Center houses a small redundant data center.  This location contains servers, storage and core network gear.

Both the main data center in ITC006 and the redundant data center in DeVolder utilize the NetApp SnapMirror technology.  With this product enabled, data that is written in one location, is then replicated at the redundant site.  Currently, only core services such as DNS, DHCP, core web server and A/D are duplicated at the redundant site.  Over time additional services will be added to the redundant site, including such applications as Moodle.

In addition, there is cheaper storage in DeVolder and Ackerman Hall that is used as secondary storage.  All primary storage is transferred to secondary disk storage, a minimum of one time per day.

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Redundant power

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NetApp storage and Cisco UCS blade servers

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Redundant core

Creativity — Utilizing 3-D Printing

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Sharp bends in fiber optic cables can negatively impact the data flowing across the fiber.  After years of fiber hanging from a network device, the cable can become deformed.  Dave McEvilly (lead windows sys admin) designed and printed a cable management structure utilizing Vectorworks Designer and a Makerbot Replicator 2.

The cost of materials for printing this project was approximately $1.00.  A commercial cable management product is in the range of $30 – $50.  The locally produced product exactly meets our needs, whereas the commercial product is “made to work”.  Below is a view of the product in production.  Each waterfall took approximately four hours to print.

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McEvilly Waterfall — 2014

Data Warehouse

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The new dimensional data warehouse was launched June 2, 2014.  The WOU model uses the Kimball approach to modeling.  The current warehouse contains data from Finance, Student and Human Resources.  Both canned reports and ad-hoc query capability are available.  The data is refreshed on a nightly basis.

The model was developed using a product called Oracle ODI.  ODI is the same tool that is used to perform the nightly data refresh.  Historical data is preserved during the refresh process.  The modeled data is then transformed into a business friendly format utilizing Cognos Framework Manager.  Cognos Connection is the web-based end-user reporting tool.

The warehouse team includes:

  • Richard Kavanagh — Kimball modeling expert
  • Shea Hawes — SIS expert
  • Nick Miller — FIS/HR expert
  • Max Chartier — Reports guru
  • Jared Petersen — Reports, web docs, etc.  (student employee, honors student)
  • Michael Ellis — Project development

For access to the data warehouse contact datasecurity@wou.edu

Data warehouse resources can be found here.

Available warehouse reports can be found here.

The warehouse can be found here.

Domain Name Services (DNS)

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WOU operates a primary DNS, along with several secondary DNS servers.  The primary server runs on a Sun Microsystems server running Solaris 10.  The secondary servers run on Cisco blade servers running RedHat Linux on top of VMware, a virtualization engine.  The servers are configured and maintained by Dave Diemer, unix systems administrator.

DNS servers allow you to access a destination on the internet using words, rather than numbers.  As an example, you can use https://wou.edu instead of https://140.211.127.171.  There is a tool called nslookup that you can use to determine the ip address associated with a domain name.  Another tool, dig, returns additional information, including which DNS servers can authoritatively respond with the ip address associated with the domain name.

There is a good document on the history and usage of Domain Name Servers here.

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Lead Unix Systems Administrator