Hello from the OUCS Systems Development and Support Section, or “sysdev” as we are known by our friends.
We are one of the Infrastructure Systems and Services teams within OUCS, and specialise in delivering a range of high availability IT services. Some services, such as Web Single Sign-On, are entirely our responsibility whilst others, such as WebLearn, are hosted by us on behalf of other teams. We also provide a number of internal tools to support OUCS such as the Request Tracker, and public facilities such as the mirror.ox.ac.uk site.
Our systems are built almost entirely on the Debian GNU/Linux platform, and we offer specialised advice in this area. For those interested in such things, our current server estate is mainly Sun (now Oracle) based, with the tail-end of some older IBM kit being taken out of service this year.
The type of service that we manage keeps us in day-to-day contact with ITSS around the University, although we do have the pleasure of providing 2nd/3rd line support to other University IT users and working with broader-based project groups around Oxford.
We hope that this blog will enable us to provide more information about what we are getting up to, notify you of changes to the range of services that we are involved in delivering, and raise various topics of general interest to anyone working in the same field as ourselves.