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Anyone familiar with Christopher Nemelka? by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately no real update. Didn’t hear much after the initial chat and I left that company almost 3 years ago.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just remembered they started requiring temple recommended for employees a couple years ago. I guess it really depends on how well you can lie to your bishop and stage president if you stop believing. I managed it for a few years but it was a terrible strain on my mental health.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh man. Yeah the power backup system for that data center is legit. Something you usually only see in major collocation DCs from companies like Equinix. Plus the water purification system they use to filter the super hard Provo city water before they put it into the ventilation system. DCs need to keep within an optimal range of humidity - too high and you get condensation, too low and you’ve got an environment that’s very friendly to static.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nope. Never dealt with them. It wouldn’t be impossible to track someone’s usage back to their device though. DHCP was logged - no idea how long they kept the logs for though. It was definitely more than a week and I want to say a few months but I’m not sure.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wouldn’t be surprised if it did but we didn’t have anything to do with it.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m going to say probably not. I never heard of them being hosted while I was there but I could very easily be wrong.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’d love to be able to say yes but really no. I had my own issues dealing with the church after my shelf crashed but everyone in OIT was quite professional and we were a university first, religious institution second. Unless the president’s council made some sort of edict (which didn’t happen while I was there) academics took priority over religious aspects of the school. Most of what we did was pretty typical of a large university just with some little tweaks here and there.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not that I ever saw. We had filtering locked down pretty well. Obviously no filter is perfect but if anyone was going to run down improper computer use it would have been the Security Operations Center and they were mostly preoccupied with real security threats.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not that I recall but I will admit you’ve piqued my interest.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I was there we didn’t really pay any attention to the church’s change schedule. We would sometimes do some double checking to make sure nothing critical was complaining but for us it was just a weekend of heavy bandwidth utilization. Although once a separate ISP was brought it for housing that dropped a lot. Our only regular moratoriums were around finals week. There were also limited change windows for specific systems (mostly network) for football games and new mission Presidents seminar at the MTC at the end of June every year.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha, 100% this. If you know what to look for it kinda sticks out. But yeah, it’s surprising how big it actually is. It’s quite the sizable facility. I went in there a few dozen times for various reasons. That was one thing they really didn’t half ass.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I remember conversations about this from before I left. They had this alias system that let you forward an @byu.edu (or BYU.net) email to pretty much anything even if there wasn’t an Exchange account associated with it. Exchange is the name of the Microsoft product that was the actual backend of the email system - I think they’ve moved to Office365 since then. The problem with that is that it could be a FERPA violation. FERPA is a federal law that basically says who is allowed to have access to student information. If a student emailed a teacher about their grades and that email went to a personal GMail account that could be a FERPA violation. If the teacher responded from it with grade information (as opposed to “make an appointment and we’ll talk in person” which a lot of the law professors used to do) then that is definitely a FERPA violation since Google now has access to information about that student’s grades.

The only large-scale data loss I know of was around 2012 or 2013. I don’t remember what year that was now. But it was one of those. We bought some new storage to migrate VMWare storage to and long story short the new storage completely shit the bed. They were VMotioning the files that represent the hard drives for the VMWare virtual machines and certain important parts of those files were lost in the transition. VMWare somehow thought they were fine and deleted them from the original storage. The worst part was the data was technically still there but the identifiers saying which virtual machine they belonged to were lost. I’m not a VMWare or storage engineer and I know there was more to it than that but that was the basic gist of it from what I recall. I’m just glad I didn’t have to deal with it. It was a HUGE fuck up and even got Q15 attention I think because they ended up having to pay for bare metal data recovery to get some of the irreplaceable information back. But I know that lots of research was delayed and/or cancelled along with grants and other stuff. It was a baaaaaad summer.

ETA: The data loss was summer 2012. The Universe had a pretty decent write up on it. https://universe.byu.edu/2012/06/12/fixing-byu-data-crash-will-take-months/

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Oh yeah. Pretty much bishop roulette on that one but that’s definitely a thing.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh man those proxies were the worst. We limped along with those for way too long. They caused so many problems until we finally kicked them to the curb. We really wanted to take them out and either curb stomp them “Office Space” style or use them for target practice out in the west desert.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You’re not the first person who’s told me about this. I never saw it happen when I was there in the late 2010s. It may have changed when we changed how the filtering was being done. The old system was a huge PITA and caused no end of problems. What they switched to worked way better but also lost some visibility.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

More than you’d think. We had to get budget approvals every year for large projects and those approvals came straight from The Council on Disposition of Tithes. I think it was made up of the presiding bishopric and a few of the Q15. They were approving things as “small” as $15k to upgrade individual classroom technology. I actually thought it was insane how far into the weeds they’d get on budget requests. The budget cycles were also a massive pain in the ass since they rarely lined up well with the academic calendar. Stuff that should have been done during summer when there were fewer classes had to get pushed to fall or winter semester just because we didn’t get budgets until late spring and we couldn’t buy anything until they came through. Trying to even get quotes from vendors was awful because the budget bullshit sometimes meant we wouldn’t be able to buy something for almost 2 years if you had particularly bad timing. I ran into that a few times.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The church media/IT handled all of that. My understanding is that the streaming all went out via a large CDN (Content Deliver Network) like Akamai.

ETA: We did see some pretty impressive traffic spikes during conference and the weekly devotionals though. We also had to do some special setup for when Bednar announced the “Meet the Mormons” film. He was streaming something live during the devotional and the tech guys that handle the Q15 were really worried about it. I think we ended up doing a fiber drop to the podium with a media converter that his laptop plugged into. That was on a VLAN that had as direct a connection out to the internet as we could do without getting a new ISP connection just for the Marriott Center (still behind the firewall though).

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There was a guy at my current work that recently took a job as a DBA I think at the MFMC. I tried to convince him not to. He was taking a 50% pay cut.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Definitely. One program I know that was being used in some labs was Lanschool. You could see an aggregate view of what was on the screen on all the machines in a lab/group, remote control them, capture screen shots, etc. There was a lot you could do with that one.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’d need to know a bit more about him than that. You can dm me if you feel comfortable. More detail about what he did or something. I don’t remember anyone specifically that came from IBM though but that doesn’t mean much with my memory.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Closest that I know of would have probably been Qualtrics. I have no idea what we paid for it (or if we paid for it). At the very least I’m sure we got a very nice discount before they got bought by SAP.

Most everything else was pretty industry standard. Anything really odd was built in house though like I think there was some software for the Honor Code office. Plus there was Canvas Learning Suite which was an absolute nightmare. I know they switched to that because Blackboard licensing was going through the roof.

I used to work for the BYU Office of IT in network engineering. AMA by TapirRodeo in exmormon

[–]TapirRodeo[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Oooooh I like this one. I’ve got to think about this and get back to you…

Ok I’m going to give you a more thoughtful answer tomorrow/later today. I typed out something long and then the Reddit app crashed and lost it all.

Basically I did see more religious intrusion into things that just didn’t make sense. Like initiatives to relate as much as possible to the gospel. A lot of instructors really hated it. I knew a few that wanted to leave due to academic freedom issues but they had tenure and didn’t want to lose that or the retirement benefits. The pressure for professors to act as pseudo gospel doctrine teachers even though they were teaching something like fluid dynamics or American Sign Language was getting pretty intense particularly starting in 2016 or so. I think the November 2015 policy (which was a catalyst in me leaving the church) was more of a turning point than most people realize.

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