linux

Software Engineer

Organization: 
Community Software Lab
VISTA Name: 
Chris Sacca
Program Start: 
9/2004
Program End: 
9/2005
Project Outcome: 

SINGLE NETWORK-WIDE USERNAME (LDAP SERVER)
This project moved us from a system that involved either multiple passwords for a user to remember for our different services, or synchronizing files between machines. Under the new system, users have one password, there is only a single box housing all the user information, and data about users is easily associable with their account, allowing us to do organization-wide address books and the like.

BETTER EMAIL AND SPAM FILTERING (EMAIL SERVER)
After the LDAP Server, our email service was transferred off of the one box we were running all our services off of and moved to a much more powerful dedicated box. The new system involved keeping all the information about email accounts in the LDAP Server, the beginnings of a unified login page for all our services, and better Spam and virus filtering where Spam is quarantined online rather than sent to the user. Currently, our Spam filtering is about 99.18% efficient, with a false positive rate of 0.31%

SYSTEM SCRIPTS
Chris designed a handful of different Perl scripts to automate and / or facilitate the administration of our systems. These included a reworking of out account creation script to handle the new LDAP Server, various small backup and synchronization scripts, and scripts to make sure that current configuration files and the files in our backup were in sync.

CREATED BACKUP SYSTEM FOR SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
Although we had checklists for setting our many systems up in the case that they failed and needed to be rebuilt, the instructions were complicated, and were not always compete. With this project, we attempted to put all the important configuration files into a backup system so that if a machine died, the configuration files could be replaced without rewriting them from scratch.

FINDING AN OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVE TO MS EXCHANGE
Implementation has just stared. Exchange Server is a powerful group collaboration and organization tool, but it is not aimed at small non-profits. It is non-free software and has high costs. The goal of this project is to take one of the open source alternatives to Exchange and implement it for one of our clients. The system will allow our client to use the full powers of their MS Outlook email client.

BECOMING A DEBIAN LINUX DEVELOPER
Chris is getting certified as a Debian GNU/Linux developer. As a Debian developer, Chris can add software we wrote to the Debian software repository. The hundreds of thousands of people using Debian GNU/Linux can then easily install our software.

Transmission Project