Marco Schmidt
IT Coordinator / Expert Information Technology
Marco is responsible and coordinationg all IT support issues of the FGCZ.
System administration of Linux servers is his main part. Besides the Linux servers for infrastructure (Web Server, File Server with SAN), he is responsible for a SLURM cluster with around 30 nodes of different configurations. The cluster consists of several nodes of real hardware and on demand attached virtual computers of an OpenStack based cluster provided by UZH(external pageScienceCloud). Together with the respective bioinformatics experts he maintains this cluster, which is used for area specific bioinformatic applications.
Besides a few Linux desktop systems, the FGCZ uses mainly Windows PC for office desks and instrument operation, which are installed and maintained by Marco. A Windows Active Directory Domain Controller was setup and connected to B-Fabric to serve the authentication and authorization for the whole FGCZ computing infrastructure.
He has automated all standard tasks like installation of operating systems (Linux and Windows) via network with some opensource tools (Fai, WPKG, ...). With the help of B-Fabric the user administration is completely automated and synchronized with the Windows Active Directory.
The main Linux disto used at FGCZ is Debian/Ubuntu. For easier maintenaince of them, Marco set up a Debian package repositoriy, which contains many self written configuration packages.
The support for MacOS desktop systems is another area of his work.
All on site web applications based on opensource used by FGCZ where installed, configured and maintained by Marco, like GitLab, TikiWIki, O-Fork, Nexus, Nextcloud, Open-Xchange, GLPI, ....
In colaboration with the IT department of the correspondung institutions external pageUZH/ETH, he is responsible for the IT infrastructure like network, email, DNS, backup and storage.
Consulting, testing, support in external pageB-Fabric Data Integration is another aspect of his work. This includes datamanagement via the SOAP API of B-Fabric.