Job

Des Saunders (des@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au)
Thu, 3 Aug 1995 16:53:59 +1000

To: des@nospam.socs.uts.EDU.AU
From: J.Zorzi@nospam.uts.edu.au (John Zorzi)
Subject: Employment of technical support person

Des,

Hi there! I am the "Acting Faculty Computer Support Manager" for the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, essentially I will be replacing
Terry Darling who has moved on to bigger and better things. Due to this, my
previous position has become vacant and we have decided to employ two
half-time people rather than attempt to find one person with the required
mix of capabilities we need. One of these positions has been filled by
somebody who previously spent six months with us on work experience and you
were recomended to me by Narelle Clark as the other position is a more
technical one and a computer science student would be ideal.
Apart from the technical details listed below, the most important
requirement for this position is that the person selected be a team player.
As much as we try to present a positive face to our "supportees" there is
often a siege mentality apparent and the selected person would need to work
well in this atmosphere. There will be little supervision so the usual
stuff about the applicant being a self-starter applies here.

Tasks:

Management of two Solaris 2.4 servers, used for POP3 email, a secondary DNS
server, a HTTP world wide web server, a TFTP server for our 4 localtalk
routers and potentially for remote access. The email server is used by the
Humanities faculty and presently has about 50 accounts, however most of
these accounts are for email only so require a minimum of administration.
Experience in perl scripting would be an advantage here as at present all
accounts are created manually but we should be getting automation scripts
which would need to be customised.

Configuration of a Telebit Netblazer modem server. The operating system for
this machine is a version of Unix so Solaris experience should suffice.
However, the modems that are connected will require some scripting so modem
communications experience would be useful.

Tape backup of the Solaris servers.

Macintosh experience would be an advantage as Macs are the most common
computer in the building.

TCP/IP setups for Macintosh computers used by students and staff in the Bon
Marche building.

Some network wiring - usually testing and replugging when a computer is
moved and a connection needs to be changed from ethernet to localtalk and
vice versa.

There would also probably be some computer support work, usually dealing
with Macintosh problems.

Some administration of network systems such as Lattistalk routers, RevRDist
images, Laser Disk Charge disks and other simple network related stuff.

The only really vital stuff is the Unix experience, everything else would
be trivial to learn for somebody with sufficient experience in Unix and an
open mind about different architectures.

I believe the pay would be as for level 5. I think the full time position
gets about 29k per annum for a 35 hour week, so halve that.

The hours would be fairly flexible, 17 hours per week to be worked whenever
convenient (within the bounds of reason and the other employees), ideal for
a student. The occasional evening work would not be out of the question
provided this does not conflict with any awards or administrative
guidelines.

At present, the position will last for six months (with contract) but I'm
sure that if this setup works that there would be a continuation, for how
long I cannot say as my own position is only until the end of the year.
Also, the list of tasks will be added to and subtracted from as needed
throughout the year and as we find out who is best suited to carry out
which particular tasks.

Thanking you in advance for any help you can offer us,

Yours sincerely,

John Zorzi.

Des Saunders
Industry Liaison Officer
School of Computing Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123
BROADWAY NSW 2007
AUSTRALIA
Email: des@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 330-1804 Fax: +61 2 330-1807