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System Administration Made Easy

Submitted By Jenkins User Scott Meyer
The sysadmin in higher education was seeking a less time-consuming solution to maintaining install packages year after year.
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Organization: A community college in Iowa
Industries: Education Information Technology
Programming Languages: Batch, Powershell
Platform: : Windows

Using Jenkins to help automate tasks with the SysAdmin environment.

Background: Making certain that the software packages we deploy on our systems remains stable is challenging. And downloading the software from 30+ projects is time consuming. I work in education, but anyone in any industry could have similar results.

Goals: Keeping deployed software packages up to date.

Solution & Results: I wrote a pipeline that will download the software installers from vendor websites and copy them out to our network for deployment. The biggest thing was being able to see if my deployment was successful without having to check or do it manually. Otherwise the results I saw were:

  • Less time maintaining the install packages semester to semester
  • Everything was repeatable
  • No manual tasks required
It gave me a framework to work out and stage my end goal, and made the process repeatable.
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Scott Meyer, Sr. Systems Analyst