Meet the Team behind the Library’s Systems and Digital Services! Franky, Joey, Adrian, Andrew, Leo, Sam, Terry, Martin, and Holly.
Among many other things, they manage over 55 computer servers with well over 70 individual applications – from simple things like LDAP identity lookup to complex beasts like our Room Booking System.
Most of those servers have been running on CentOS7, which will reach its end-of-life by this coming Summer. Since these applications are mission critical, all these servers need to be upgraded to a new OS (operating system). That is a crazy big job to manage, when every application has to be tested and adjusted to work on the new server.
All the people in that photo are heroes to me. Except the guy in the red jacket – that’s me and I just offer support and encouragement. Everyone else there does the real work.
To make things more complicated, several of the larger applications need to be upgraded just to work on the new OS – a double set of upgrades! They tell me the worst one has 32 individual upgrade steps just to get it ready for the server migration!
So if you see one of these people out and about, maybe offer them a cup of coffee. Or maybe more calming tea, to reduce their stress. 🙂
And say thank you – the people behind the scenes keep everything running just for you.
Edward Spodick
Associate Director of Library Services
lbspodic@ust.hk
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