Hardware and Software Support

Hardware and Software Support

The IT Department of the University of Maryland University College which is located in Heidelberg, Germany has used many different configuration in their effort to keep the systems running efficiently. When I first started working there in 1999 we were using very old and slow systems based on Pentium 2 processors and about 256 megs of RAM for our workstations. The mini main frame was running an older version of Unix with an IBM power pc processor and about 10 gigs of RAM running virtualization software and raid 5 arrays. The email server was running on windows 2000 server with a virtual server for the print server using a corporate email client software and Netscape Navigator as their browser. There was an internet server running red hat Linux and it had the corporate version of Norton’s Virus Scanner.

The following years with many advances in the computing field allowed for the IT department to upgrade many of their servers to handle the load of information coming into the system. The main server gat a processor upgrade to an Itanium processor with eight cores and about 25 gigs or RAM along with an OS upgrade to server 2003 to help take the load off the other systems. The workstation’s got a update with Dell computers that had Pentium 4 processors and 1 gig of RAM and updated NIC cards for intranet and internet access. They were running Windows XP to help with a lot of software incompatibility and driver problems. All the workstations were upgraded to use IE as the main browser for many internet compatibility problems. The email and print servers were moved to virtualization on the main server to save money and the email client was changed to Outlook because of the online classes using new software to do online conferences with the teachers. The internet server was still running Linux just an updated version of red hat along with new hardware and updated Norton’s Virus and Norton’s Ghost Utility to make backups...