Q3 provides Remote System Administration for a Linux based Operating System

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Summary

The Client needed a Linux System Administrator to provide services remotely from Q3's offshore development center to (a) keep their Linux boxes running, (b) provide system administration for their proprietary software; (c) perform version control with subversion for both the development and the production repositories (they deploy the software with subversion in addition to using it for development version control). They hired Q3's services to do the above tasks.

Company Profile

The Client is based in the US and is a premier provider of enterprise software and services for proficiency-based learning and collaboration. They have more than fifteen years of experience building some of the world's most effective blended learning programs, communities of practice and online workspaces and have been conferred numerous industry awards for being innovative and technologically advanced.

Business Situation

The Client had a need for an experienced and technically sound System Administrator with expertise in the Linux OS and Shell Scripts to remotely manage 5 servers that the Client had. Q3 assigned a senior System Administrator from its vast resource pool to work on this project.

The challenges faced by the System Administrator in undertaking the tasks were as follows:

• understanding the entire proprietary software structure;
• making changes to the existing shell scripts & cron entries
• Executing successful group & individual Patch rollouts within the stipulated time announce to the end clients.
• Managing the disk space an clearing the log files keeping backups in mind
• Managing backup and ensuring the backups are in place
• Migrating applications from the existing servers to the new Linux boxes.

Technical Solution

The tasks performed by the System Administrator were as follows:

• General linux system administration
  • Keep an eye on resource usage (disk, RAM, swap, CPU)
  • Maintain services (http, subversion, linux email, mysql, named/DNS, fsav/clamd antivirus, "health" reports, iptables/firewall/drop-list)
  • Linux & utilities updates on a regular basis
  • Configure new servers as needed
• Proprietary software services and failover network
  • First contact/first responder in case servers or services crash.
  • Monitor proprietary software resource usage ("health" reports, iostats measurements, heap memory usage, thread usage)
  • Verify backup/failover systems work on a regular basis
  • If a server fails, bring up the proprietary software in failover servers
  • Alertra monitor(s) and related scripts
  • Install new proprietary software, archive & delete old proprietary software.
  • Manage roll-outs of new versions of proprietary software.
  • Maintain and extend proprietary installer scripts, and related diagnostic/utility scripts
    

Technologies

• RHEL5 / CentOS / Windows 2003
• Apache 2
• JBOSS 4
• Java 1.5
• Shell Scripts
  

Benefits

• The systems were monitored and managed
• The times were crucial for the client as their off hours were Q3’s working hours which gave the extra leverage