From server problems to privacy issues, Chris Palsgrove makes the McDaniel network work
By Ashleigh Smith
The McDaniel College community constitutes 8,500 e-mail accounts between the students, faculty and staff. That’s a lot of spam, and there’s one man who oversees it all?the Network Communications Systems Administrator, Chris Palsgrove.
Most people at McDaniel probably only notice the e-mail system or the intranet when something is wrong and we have to run to IT, but it has to be maintained every day, and “That’s a pretty big responsibility,” said Palsgrove. “It’s not easy and we do the best we can?and we have a lot of people to keep happy.”
Palsgrove is the man behind all of our e-mail accounts. Part of his job is to create and maintain e-mail for everyone on campus, including monitoring spam e-mails in addition to a few other odd jobs.
“I do a lot of proofreading,” he added, “for campus announcements that go out. I wind up going over them, and I guess because it’s something coming from the main voice of the [college], I make sure that everything looks professional.”
However, Palsgrove deals with a lot more than the campus announcements. When people have problems with their e-mail, he’s the one they call.
“Especially with the switchover,” Palsgrove said, “[a]ll different kinds of problems come in about how to access mail from the outside, how to use the webmail interface, why isn’t the webmail interface working, why is it slower than the old one.”
Last summer, McDaniel was introduced to the Zimbra e-mail suite, which replaced the old Squirrel Mail.
For e-mail users, “[i]t’s a whole lot easier because it works more like e-mail systems that people are used to, like Outlook Express or Thunderbird or Apple Mail,” said Palsgrove, who also commented that for his job, “The new system makes it very easy. You put information in, and it sets everything else up for you.”
The transfer process is still ongoing, according to Palsgrove, and he hopes the old system will be completely gone by the upcoming summer.
“Probably fifteen percent of the stuff that we moved over was unnecessary,” Palsgrove added. “People don’t empty out their trash and it winds up taking up resources that we really don’t have to spare.”
Recently, IT added space to the e-mail server by removing 4,600 old e-mail accounts, held by already-graduated students or old professors.
“There were some people who weren’t too happy about that,” said Palsgrove. “There were some people who didn’t really care, but we can’t keep e-mail accounts for a lifetime.
“I guess it was kind of a big deal when I hit the big button,” he added, “and cut that many people off of e-mail.”
Palsgrove has been at McDaniel for almost four years and stepped up to his current position just over a year ago in December. “I had enough experience and enthusiasm that I stepped right in and started learning,” Palsgrove said.
“When I was in college I messed around with computers quite a bit, even though it wasn’t my major,” said Palsgrove, who majored in Spanish. “Spanish didn’t really hold my interest. It wasn’t something that I felt I could use around here as much as my computer knowledge.
“As long as I can keep learning in this position I’d like to stay here,” he said. “I learn things every day, from different experiences, different little mistakes that I make, different things that I run into and having to solve problems. When I finally figure something out it’s very rewarding.”
Palsgrove also hopes to continue to work on McDaniel’s intranet system. “There are a lot of projects I’d like to continue working on, see to completion or just see develop more. In the next month or two [I’ll] build up the intranet so all the on-campus resources, we’re going to try to centralize them, basically a single interface where everyone can get to all of the things they need to.”
The IT department also hopes to expand on giving students just one username and password for e-mail, Archway and Blackboard, which was done last summer by allowing students to log in just once to access all three. “We don’t have any time frame set on that yet,” Palsgrove added.
While Palsgrove enjoys his job, it’s not always exciting; some nights, he stays until eight or nine. “[I]t’s a little tough sitting in front of a computer screen all day,” he said.
“One of the parts I hate the most is parents calling for their kids,” Palsgrove added, “because I’m not really allowed to share any confidential information with parents.
“There’s only a certain amount of things we can do in dealing with privacy. College e-mail accounts are the property of the college, so we technically own them and can do with them what we want, but there’s also an expectation of privacy. Especially with grades and communication between students and faculty, communication between, say, campus safety and students, health services and students. Those are all matters that absolutely have to be kept confidential,” said Palsgrove.
According to Palsgrove, balancing the e-mail system with all of the other systems can get very complex. “[The] 8,500 e-mail accounts, that’s a lot to take care of, and that adds to the complexity of the systems we have to maintain.”
So next time you head down to IT, be sure to give a thank you to the people working behind the scenes.