Information Technology Services (ITS) Math Migration Project Makes for Efficient Computing
Previously, the Binghamton University Math Department operated its own mail server, storage servers, and network including LDAP, DHCP and DNS. Once the full-time staff supporting this area retired, ITS was asked to take on the operation and incorporate all the existing customizations into the centralized campus services. This huge, ongoing, and complex project has taken over nine months to complete since the project’s kickoff. Every area of ITS helped with this project in some way. These include Project Management, Systems, Networking, Technical Support, and Innovation and Security. Watson IT staff were integral to this project as well.
The main goal of the project involved migrating the entire math department from outdated systems to Binghamton University’s current centralized infrastructure. This was a huge effort with some key project task highlights:
- Created new user accounts so they matched the current ITS account creation process
- Migrated all mail from the existing math mail server to Binghamton University email
- Created a new network and moved every port to the new network
- Moved file and storage servers
- Created new ways for users to extract data and create class lists using SAS
- Moved users from Gradebook to Brightspace
- Updated windows machines and more …
One major update turned out to be more complex than usual. Updating the existing Linux machines to the new operating system, Ubuntu, required a BIOS password set. Not knowing the BIOS password, technical support had to request a reset code from Dell. Sometimes the code Dell provided worked, while other times it did not. In the cases where the code did not work, Dell would have to send the technical support team a new motherboard which would then have to be installed before proceeding with the install/upgrade.
The most time consuming part of the project was migrating the math department’s email. Some users were using the much outdated “SquirrelMail” on their own email server. This all had to be migrated to gmail (campuswide BMail). ITS Technical Support finessed the import of the mail extracted from SquirrelMail into BMail. This was not an easy or clean transition and many mail migrations took over a week based on the size of the mailbox and folder structure.
Successful objectives of this entire process included:
- Individual assistance was required to successfully migrate all faculty, staff, emeritus and grad students.
- There was extensive meeting, planning, troubleshooting and testing done to make this migration process run smoothly, currently still meeting weekly.
- Migration began with attention on current faculty and staff
- Continued with Emeritus faculty, who live all over the country with some residing in assisted living facilities.
In the case of setting up the new systems and migrating the Emeritus faculty’s data, the team worked with them on the phone or in a Zoom meeting. Emeritus expressed gratitude for making sure their old math email and old math files were also migrated.
Overall this project has been successful and any issues were resolved quickly. At
first, the Math Department was a bit hesitant, but once the project began moving along
the feedback was very positive. Kudos to all ITS staff involved, as this project was
a substantial team effort.
As the Math Migration project comes to a close, there are still loose ends to tie up. There are 42 linux computers in the math testing lab that have also been migrated. We are using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to manage these computers. They are locked down so they can only get to the textbook publisher and digital learning platform (Cengage) testing site. The math department also hosts their own webpages in Dokuwiki (an open source wiki application that does not require a database). This migration is still in process.
