In anticipation of Ross leaving, and since Ross has been very active and diligent in providing network administration for our group, we graduate students had a meeting several weeks ago regarding system administration duties.  For the past eighteen months, the system administration duties have fallen rather heavily on a handful of students.  One goal of our meeting was to spread the system administration duties more evenly.  A related goal was to pair more experienced students who are further along in their studies with newer students of lesser experience so that in the future better continuity of service is provided.

During the meeting, sysadmin duties were categorized, and all graduate students volunteered for or were assigned duties.  The results of these assignments are given on a system administration web page

http://black.csl.uiuc.edu/admin/index.html

which is linked from our DCL web page.

The purpose of this web page is to allow the Professors to monitor the participation of their graduate students in sysadmin responsibilities.  We realize that the best motivation for graduate students is the interest of their advisor.  In this spirit, we have included task assignments and progress updates on the system administration web page.  We ask that you take a few minutes every week or so to peruse the web page, in order to monitor the contribution of your students.  Knowledge that you are doing this should be all the motivation that the graduate students need.