This is great, in february I started my new job at a new university as a research technician / lab manager. And although at previous universities I always had "trouble" with the ICT departments (not having admin rights being always the first one).
This ICT department is, well special. They dropped the T of technology.
So now I want to get a laboratory network with a few simple requests:
- No internet access, but access to the intranet (for the matlab licence servers)
- A file storage system, so that anybody (students and staff) can store research results (now mostly dropbox is used for that)
- A version control system to store program code in. A web front-end like github or bitbucket would be nice.
- A booking system for apparatus
Their answer after no less than three meetings:
- We cannot do that because all our systems are directly coupled to the internet.
- If you do not want to use dropbox we can recommend the following: "Google Drive or MS OneDrive
- Well this one was in more stages:
a. what is a version control system (after I explained that)
b. can't you just use zipfiles in Dropbox (after I explained that I would lose stuff like knowing who changed the code)
c. We could create a network drive (aha you can do that) and then you could see who changed the file by looking at the previous versions of that file (are they really now proposing to use shadow copy as a VCS?, after explaining that and pointing again to github)
d. We are not a company delivering cloud solutions.
So now I will not only be a research technician / lab manager but also an ICT specialist here.
Okay then I would like to have a few patch-port to patch-port patches (e.g. direct links between ports with no switch in between) to setup my own network and servers inside that.
They did not know how to do that and had to place me in contact with the company they always use for those kind of complex infrastructural things.
So now after this last meeting I'm going to cry in the corner.