Marco Schmidt

IT Coordinator / Expert Information Technology

Marco is responsible and coordinationg all IT support issues of the FGCZ.

This includes system administration of Linux servers for file and web services needed for daily business.

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.

For the bioinformatic section at FGCZ he manages large storage systems which have redundant Fibre-Channel attached SAN storage provided by ZIUZH. This includes backup of the storage and an archive strategy which is tightly connected to the B-Fabric. All data is annotated in B-Fabric. As useless data is usually not annotated, it is easy to filter this out and delete it. Data which is worth storing can easily be migrated to an archive (Tape) if the usuall usage time is over. As all data has a defined status depending on the storage location, it is possible to get the data back from the archie to the disk by a simple click in B-Fabric. This concept saves valuable disk space and limits usually exponential growth to more or less constant storage size. 

As the data needs to be convertes/analyses by the bioinformatics, he orders installs and manages FGCZ sever hardware with nodes with many cpus and large memory (1TB) in an own SLURM cluster. Additional computing resources are attached on demand to the SLURM cluster whenver needed. The Science IT section of ZIUZH maintains a external page ScienceCloud based on OpenStack where FGCZ and all UZH scientists can get computing resources as needed. 

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 distribution 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, .... All of this must fit with the strict security rules for network applications of UZH. This includes getting certificates, implementing user authentication and authorization and firewall configuration.

In colaboration with the IT department of the corresponding institutions external page UZH/ETH, he is responsible for the IT infrastructure like network, email, DNS, storage, backup and archive.

Handling the renewal of the infrastructure (server, desktops, laptops and other IT devices) is part of his work, too. This includes connecting the needs of the FGCZ with the posibilities of the vendors. Additionaly this needs to fit in the budget. Discuss the needs, getting offers, buying the hardware, manage the invoices in complience with ETHZ and UZH.

To make support more efficient he creates and updates the documentation for FGCZ employees and our user and customer. This includes a more detailed explanation of ETH and UZH documentation, where there are differences from general to our specific environment. Other documentation contains detailed information on our productive server systems for emergencies. FGCZ employees can work more efficient and solve many IT problems themself with the information found in the FGCZ documentation.

Consulting, testing, support in external page B-Fabric Data Integration is another aspect of his work. This includes datamanagement via the SOAP API of B-Fabric.