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USENIX Tenth System Administration Conference (LISA
'96)
Institute White Pages as a System Administration Problem
Jon Finke
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Abstract
With the planned departure of our mainframe, we had to find a
new way to maintain and generate our Institute Telephone directory.
This gave us the opportunity to examine every aspect of the
directory generation process, and make changes to improve the
accuracy of the data, reduce the clerical workload in
Telecommunications and Human Resources and eliminate some
duplication of data and effort. Given that we already had an Oracle
based system to automatically create and remove Unix userids for
all employees as they are hired and leave, it seemed that with some
minor enhancements, this same system could also maintain our
directory information.
To this end, we added a directory module to our Simon Account
management system that extracts directory information from the
Human Resources database, adds additional non employee information
and generates LaTeX source for the printed phone book, HTML pages
for the web and a raw feed for the ph server. In addition, using
techniques developed for some of our system administration tools,
we gave both individual staff members, and their departmental
administrators, the ability to make changes and corrections to
their own directory information, which would not only appear in the
directories, but also be reflected in the official Human Resource
database. This has greatly reduced the delays and paperwork
involved in changing this information, and allows us to have
accurate and up to date directories. As an added bonus, many of our
``traditional'' systems administration tools can now directly query
the directory information and include contact info in the displays
automatically.
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