The System Administrator -- a mystery no longer Behind the ubiquitous e-mails lies a dedicated staff that keeps Midd running smoothly

Author: Lisie Mehlman

At approximately 12:01 a.m. each night, I - like many other Middlebury students - receive an e-mail from the System Administrator informing me that my "mailbox is over its size limit." While this monotonous, one-sided e-mail relationship I have developed with the System Administrator is less romantic than say, the correspondence between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks' characters in "You've Got Mail," it amuses me nonetheless. Imagine my delight then, when I found out that, in fact, there lies a man behind the mystery mandates. Actually, five men.

Yep, in what seems something like an alternate universe - the basement of Voter Hall - Tom Cutter, director of Systems and Network Services; Rick James, Unix systems administrator; Howie McCausland, director of Network Designs and Operations; Mark Pyfrom, systems programmer and Mike Halsall, system administrator, oversee the computer systems and network servers that help the College run smoothly. These five System Administrators oversee all the networks that make life for students and faculty so easy, from Tigercat to e-mail servers to BannerWeb.

Halsall volunteered to give me a tour on behalf of all the System Administrators. On Sunday evening when I met him at Voter, he was sporting a black t-shirt that had an image of R2D2 on it ("I thought it was cool," he explained) and he reminded me a little bit of Wayne Campbell from "Wayne's World," only instead of using phrases like "party on" or whatever it is that Wayne said, Halsall threw around words like "terabytes" and other computer lingo I can't report on because I can't spell the big words.

On my tour of the cluster of offices and server rooms that Halsall referred to as "our own little island," I got to see the machines where student and faculty e-mail come from, where our schedules are held, where payrolls are stored and even the server that gets rid of Spam. Halsall spoke highly of the camaraderie he shares with his co-System Administrators on the island. "There is such a cool atmosphere down here. It is a very good place to work," he said. He works from 3 p.m. until 11 p.m., usually "jamming" to music while he works. However, it was hard to decipher his feelings about the country and classic rock his boss plays most of the time.

What was most clear, however, was the pride Halsall takes in his work. "It's an interesting chair to sit in, an interesting job to do, because here, with a couple of key strokes, you can take down the whole network. There's a great responsibility. But I am providing a service, when it comes down to it, which is nice. Making sure everything is running smoothly - that is where the real pride is taken," he explained.

After working at places like IBM and Atlantic Bell, Halsall went back to school and earned his degree in computer engineering. "Corporate America sucks," he said. "Academia's where it's at." He continued, "Corporate America does not respect its employees' privacy. Here [at Middlebury] we have a strict privacy policy. We must receive explicit permission before we troubleshoot problems on students' computers. Policies like that are absolutely imperative."

Halsall went on to explain that it is the privacy academic institutions provide that is the source of one of the biggest challenges they face. "Educational institutions are notoriously insecure. One half of the system is totally controlled, but the other half is under no control, because schools do not dictate to students what they may and may not have on their computers." In fact, in the past few weeks, several institutions have actually been hacked into. Considering that the servers at Middlebury hold students' social security numbers next to their name, identity theft is a real concern. It is the job of all the System Administrators to help to make the networks as secure as possible.

But even with all this work, Halsall still has fun on "the island." He admitted to talking to the servers and computers -- "I mean, not like you talk to a pet, but, like everyone gets pissed at their computer. Each one has its own personality."

Perhaps the most entertaining part of the tour, however, was becoming privy to the creativity that goes behind naming the networks. We all know that Panther and Tigercat exist, but I learned that, a while back, the System Administrators had finally run out of cat names and had moved on to airplanes. I particularly enjoyed learning that Halsall named a server "Cirrus" because it hosts an application called "Cumulus." There were also many servers named after elements from Greek mythology. I wish I could go into more specifics, but, as Halsall explained, "When running a network, you don't want to give out more information than is needed for usability (say, the name of Tigercat) - and even though that's [leaning] a tad toward what's called security through obscurity, which is a horrible practice that can't be relied upon - you don't want to give more information than is necessary, because it gives anyone trying to break into your network targets to look at first."

At the end of the tour, Halsall addressed the original pressing issue - the e-mails every night at 12:01 a.m. "They are sent because disc space costs money," he said. "If everyone is loading up their mailboxes, that's a huge financial drain on the school." And, although he once told a gullible student that all he does all day is send out those e-mails to people telling them their mailboxes were full, in fact, the emails are sent automatically (making my imagined relationship with the System Administrator even less personal than I ever could have ever imagined). But at least now I know who's behind them.