CQUEST Technical Notes

CQUEST Technical Notes are a series of relatively brief notes about technical things that we use here and that we think have worked well or are really nifty ideas. They're written for a technically inclined system administrator, and are thus relatively full of techie jargon (that's part of how they stay compact). We're writing them partly to document our systems for posterity but mostly as a convenient short way to share our (sometimes painfully or tediously acquired) knowledge with the rest of the University of Toronto community.

If you're not familiar with what CQUEST is, you probably want to read our quick technical introduction so that the rest of this may make more sense.

What We've Got So Far

• CQUEST's new account system, which has vastly improved the student experience while simplifying our lives and automating lots of things.
• How we build servers, because there's a couple of interesting and useful techniques we use.
• How we install generic machines, including our flexible system for customizing machines at install time.
• Retroactively made a technical note, technical details on our Usenet server.
• USG's writeup on anti-spam mail filtering applies almost as much to us as it does to USG, because we use essentially the same system.

Our Failures

Often, the only things that get written up are the successes, the stories of what works well. Failures are quietly buried, never to be mentioned so that people can find out what to avoid. This deserves to be corrected.

DISCLAIMER: that these things caused problems for us does not mean that they will cause problems for you. More than that, it does not mean that they couldn't be fixed, even for us; we can only write up our current state and knowledge. If you know how to make one of our failures work, we'd love to hear from you.

Our list of failures:

• managing accounts on our Windows NT servers, which has recently become very troublesome (and always was a problem)