CS@Mines position

CS@Mines sysadmin position.md

(Sorry if you see this email from multiple mailing lists, not sure how well Exchange deals with that)

Hey CS@Mines!

Are you good at Linux? Do you want to become more involved in the department? Well there is a position open for you! I am currently the system administrator for a the CS@Mines servers - I will be graduating in December and looking to hire on a replacement. You will be shadowing/working with me over the summer, and ideally be the primary sysadmin starting in the fall, with me hanging around to help out and answer questions and smooth out the transition. In general, this position is 3-5 hours of work a week, though it varies week to week.

To apply, please email jvossen@mines.edu. Attach a copy of your Resume - and we will schedule an interview! We are primarily looking for a lower classman who has at least few years left at Mines, to try and limit the amount of turnover in the position.

Machines!

There are a few machines that you are going to be in charge of, the main ones are mastergo, megasort, and ada. mastergo and megasort are in the process of being migrated to ada, so you are going to be able to help with that! These servers host some of the tools and websites that the department uses, such as

• AlgoBOWL website: algobowl.mines.edu
• CS On Tour website: http://csontour.mines.edu/
• cstart: cstart.mines.edu
• PATHs website: http://paths.mines.edu/
• The club websites: acm.mines.edu, lug.mines.edu, and oresec.mines.edu
• Linux Mirrors that CCIT & the Mines community uses!

Responsibilities:

Besides keeping the software on the machines up to date (although that is mostly automated at this point), you'll need to make changes to the websites whenever people ask via email. This will usually involve writing HTML/CSS to add content / restyle things. When the CS department wants to host a new site/project, you will probably be around to help them set everything up.

People will also let you know when stuff breaks, and it will be your job to fix those problems ASAP. When something breaks your inbox may get flooded with tracebacks.

You will also have to work with CCIT, as well as other stakeholders to migrate software to ada

Ideal candidate skills:

Don't be intimidated if you don't have all of these! I definitely didn't when I started, and this job does provide some flexibility for learning on the job. Software stacks change, and Googling and troubleshooting is an important part of the job. With that being said, these are the types of skills that are most used:

• Linux command-line usage, including how to keep packages on an Ubuntu system updated (i.e. how to do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade)
  and how to manage services with systemd (i.e. how to do systemctl restart apache2). Knowing at least some Linux/UNIX is an absolute must.
• Git. This is a huge plus since just about all of the sites are now using Git for version control. You definitely don't need to be a pro.
• Docker is a big plus, when migrating some of the sites I have been using docker to create reproducible builds.
• HTML + CSS
• Apache Web Server configuration, most of this can be figured about by looking at /etc/apache2/sites-available
• Familiarity with databases. You'll need to learn how to do migrations, which are times where the columns of a table in a database need to be changed. It's not as scary as it sounds.

Again - don't hesitate to apply if you don't have all(or even most) of these skills!

Best,

-- Jake Vossen (he/him/his) Colorado School of Mines https://jake.vossen.dev