So what would you say you do here?

More than a few people have asked me what I'll be doing down in Antarctica. While I think there was a little line about a systems administration position in one of my posts, it was well hidden, and many of you might not know what the heck that is anyway.

So my official title is "Senior Systems Administrator." Basically, I administer computer systems. I'll be taking care of the virtualization farm, backups, email servers, file servers, file transfer servers, various other servers, and front end computers for general and scientific computing. Mostly Windows boxes, but also some Macs and Linux boxen. I imagine I'll also help the network and communications engineers as I know a little bit about those things too. My boss has also asked me if I would help the antenna riggers with antenna maintenance.

Most of the work I've been doing over the past years has been pretty specialized. I've mostly been working on the computing involved with ground systems for spacecraft, or instruments that fly on spacecraft. In addition, the other thing I've worked a lot with is high performance computing clusters-big fast computers. So this job will be more like the things I did earlier in my career. It should be interesting!

In addition, everybody helps when it's needed, so hopefully I'll get to learn and work on lots of other things. Everyone also cleans the station, washes dishes, and shovels snow. So I'll be busy, but will hopefully still have lots of time to explore, ski, operate some ham radio, and blog.



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