Introduction

This document outlines the responsibilies of CSE technical staff (support and infrastructure) for setting up and maintaining instructional resources. A companion document, Preparing Instructional Resources for Teaching Staff, outlines the responsibilities of teaching staff.

Last updated February, 2004, from information in http://rtfm.cs.washington.edu/cgi-bin/wreq/req?show-all-1-63798.

The tasks discussed here include quarterly and yearly tasks for both support staff and infrastructure staff.

Support Staff Tasks

Support Staff Quarterly Tasks

The following tasks are generally done between quarters.

Prepare Special Purpose Instructional Servers

This section enumerates special purpose instructional servers that students access directly, and gives some information as to how each is to be administered. Behind-the-scenes servers such as domain controllers, lab imaging servers, etc. are not discussed.

Windows Servers

iisqlsrv: This server is for classes needing Microsoft SQL Server and/or Frontpage Server Extensions. To prepare it for a course, support staff must do the following:

Make sure it has all relevant patches for OS, services, and applications.

Delete all databases and accounts from previous quarters.

Clear out the C:\Inetpub\wwwroot folder from previous quarters. Note: it is a good idea to uninstall Sharepoint Team Services before you do this, then reinstall it after the clean-up.

Install any additional special software required by the courses.

Make everyone in the class "Server Extension Administrators", thus giving them the right to publish webs.

If necessary, give one of the TAs for the course to be taught SQL administrator ("SA") access and/or local admin access

The TA will then add SQL accounts for all students in the class and set up databases as needed.

Unix Servers

spinlock, coredump: These are linux servers configured as compile and project file servers for CSE451, Operating Systems. The "regular" student machines do not have the capacity to deal with huge VMware images.
as-needed servers: Frequently classes will need extra compute power or disk space from linux servers belonging to researchers that are dedicated to instructional use for just one quarter. These are configured as needed. (E.g. amnia, kiska, umnak.)

Accounts and Groups

temporary accounts: Remove all temporary accounts (type IC or RC in user-rec). The expiration dates of temporary accounts determine when they are to be removed.
vole accounts: Add accounts on vole for all TAs who have registered for the upcoming quarter.
tas group: Renew the tas group with next quarter's TAs. Among other things, this allows TAs to use the CSE Reservation System to check out equipment and to reserve time slots in the TA offices for their office hours.

Delete Projects

Unless informed to the contrary by course instructors, delete student project files (under /projects/instr) that are older than 1 1/4 years.

Check Course Files

The course trees are under /cse/courses/.

Run the script to create any new course directories, if needed.
Clean out /cse/courses/etc/turnin.cf and update /cse/courses/etc/turnin_courses with the new list.

Note in each case an instructor or TA will be responsible for removing or adjusting permissions of any files under a previous quarter, e.g. removing world read access from former homework assignments.

Support Staff Yearly Tasks

Archive Course Directories

During summer, copy all of /cse/courses/cse* to /cse/courses/course_archives/yyyy-yyyy/, where yyyy-yyyy is the previous academic year, e.g. /cse/courses/course_archives/2002-2003/, replacing directories with links as necessary. For example, /cse/courses/cse000/03wi would be copied to /cse/courses/course_archives/2002-2003/cse000/, then deleted and replaced with a symbolic link to /cse/courses/course_archives/2002-2003/cse000/03wi.

You may need to archive the oldest acedemic year to CD, then delete it, if disk space is tight, but we should be keeping 5 to 10 years of courses on-line.

Other Technical Staff Tasks

Other Technical Staff Quarterly Tasks

Prepare Special Purpose Instructional Servers.

Windows Servers.

goliath, aka games: An SQL server. Was used for cse481. Not backed up. Zahorjan may know the details.
pascal: Turnin server for cse14x. Dan Boren has the details; there is also a wiki, but too bad it's only viewable by Rose and Boren.

Linux Servers.

cubist: This is a Linux server for classes needing an Apache web server and Postgres database. See cubist/doc/cubist_instructor.html for details.

Update Course Group Owners

Make sure course group owners have been updated with instructors for the upcoming quarter. Instructors can then add TAs. This is done by a script owned by Rose, /cse/www/utils/add_tas_to_groups.pl, which performs the following functions:

Adds instructors as owners/members of the course groups for the courses they are instructors of.
Optionally adds TAs to course groups for the courses they are TAing.
Optionally deletes TAs from course groups for the courses they are *not* TAing.

The idea here is that the first time it's run---before the quarter starts---it's used only for additions. Later---well after the quarter has ended---it's used to delete TAs. (Instructors are never deleted.)

This document was generated on August, 17 2004 using texi2html