SimAuthor had about sixty people in Boulder and one systems administrator. Me.
The office ran Windows and Linux servers, databases, engineering labs, web services, production systems, and a pile of employee workstations. I handled the network, the machines, the security around them, and the normal daily problems that came with all of it.
Windows Active Directory owned one side of the office. Linux and Unix owned another. I tied them together so people could use one identity instead of keeping a separate account on every machine. I rebuilt the network topology, firewalls, DMZ, VPN access, intrusion detection and prevention, and the other controls around the edge. I also ran penetration tests against the environment.
SimAuthor made flight-data visualization software. It could take recorded aircraft data and replay a flight in three dimensions for review, safety work, training, and analysis. I was not the aviation expert and I did not write FlightViz. I kept the network and systems available for the people who did.
The biggest infrastructure job was bringing the data center back into the office.
It was a full rebuild. The servers needed power, network paths, firewall rules, remote access, monitoring, backups, and a recovery plan in the new location. Employees still needed their accounts and engineering tools. Production services still had to stay up. Somebody other than me needed enough documentation to understand what they were looking at during a problem.
The goals were plain: improve availability and lower cost.
The move touched nearly everything I supported. A bad firewall rule could cut off a service. A bad directory change could lock out Linux and Windows users at the same time. A monitoring gap could leave us learning about a failure from a customer. Moving the boxes was the easy-looking part.
Westar Aerospace announced its $8 million cash acquisition of SimAuthor on March 27. The transaction had closed on March 1. The announcement explained the company from the buyer's side. Inside the Boulder office, the same list was waiting: accounts, servers, labs, VPN access, monitoring, security, and production.
The data center was home. It still needed somebody to run it.