IT Specialist
MWR, Fort Sill Oklahoma
The department was a small, 3 man team that provided IT services to MWR for the post. If you are not familiar with the Army MWR program, it's an umbrella organization for numerous programs ranging from schools and youth services to restaurants and recreation facilities to social work programs offering support to soldiers and families. These services are spread out across the post in over a dozen different buildings.
MWR, Fort Sill Oklahoma
The department was a small, 3 man team that provided IT services to MWR for the post. If you are not familiar with the Army MWR program, it's an umbrella organization for numerous programs ranging from schools and youth services to restaurants and recreation facilities to social work programs offering support to soldiers and families. These services are spread out across the post in over a dozen different buildings.
Accomplishments
Securing public use computers
The Problem:
We maintained 12 public use computers across 2 different sites for soldiers and family members to use while out of the office. However, they were accessed with a regular user account and had poor oversight and were thus plagued with malware, adware, and other such problems. About once a week, we would have to go in and service these systems, usually requiring about 2.5 hours per visit. Even with all this time being put into the systems, 2-4 would be out of service at any given time.
The Solution:
I went to the lead, and asked for permission to find a more permanent fix for the systems. He, of course, agreed knowing how much of our time these systems were taking. My goals were reducing the man hours needed to support the systems, increasing uptime, and ensuring usability for nontechnical onsite personnel. The first order of business was getting the systems moved to somewhere with better visibility to help encourage responsible computer use. We put in a new switch in one of our recreation facilities and ran drops to desks set up along the wall. All the systems and users were now out in the open to discourage users from going to inappropriate sites. To deal with the user permissions issues, I settled on a system restore program to roll the computers back to a known good configuration on every restart. I conducted a fresh install, patched the systems, configured them to work with military sites, and linked them to the network printer. I let the facility manager know to shut them down each night and advised her to restart them as a first step if any of them started acting up. For the rest of my time there, we needed only stop by once a month to install updates, and no system was out of service for longer than a an hour.
The Problem:
We maintained 12 public use computers across 2 different sites for soldiers and family members to use while out of the office. However, they were accessed with a regular user account and had poor oversight and were thus plagued with malware, adware, and other such problems. About once a week, we would have to go in and service these systems, usually requiring about 2.5 hours per visit. Even with all this time being put into the systems, 2-4 would be out of service at any given time.
The Solution:
I went to the lead, and asked for permission to find a more permanent fix for the systems. He, of course, agreed knowing how much of our time these systems were taking. My goals were reducing the man hours needed to support the systems, increasing uptime, and ensuring usability for nontechnical onsite personnel. The first order of business was getting the systems moved to somewhere with better visibility to help encourage responsible computer use. We put in a new switch in one of our recreation facilities and ran drops to desks set up along the wall. All the systems and users were now out in the open to discourage users from going to inappropriate sites. To deal with the user permissions issues, I settled on a system restore program to roll the computers back to a known good configuration on every restart. I conducted a fresh install, patched the systems, configured them to work with military sites, and linked them to the network printer. I let the facility manager know to shut them down each night and advised her to restart them as a first step if any of them started acting up. For the rest of my time there, we needed only stop by once a month to install updates, and no system was out of service for longer than a an hour.
Implementing Digital Menu Boards
The Problem:
We had three restaurants under MWR which were set to move to digital menu boards. However, when they ordered the screens to use as these boards, they ordered only the screens, no control units. We were left with 6 TVs with no suitable way of putting a menu on them. Given my success with previous tasks, I was asked to find a solution.
The Solution:
The screens had VGA, HDMI, and USB inputs. I first tried simply plugging in a flash drive and seeing if I could get a static display of the menu. Unfortunately, the TVs maxed out at a 60 second display per photo from the USB. Looping the images was possible, but there was a pause of about half a second between photos. While that might not sound bad, it looked terrible. That meant we needed a system to push an image through HDMI or VGA. A standard computer would work, but there was no good place to put it and it would be a rather expensive way of simply pushing an image to a TV. I instead went with a Raspberry Pi velcroed to the back of the TV. I wrote a simple startup script to have it display the menu automatically on boot and disabled the screen timeout. Rather than updating the menu over the LAN, with all the security concerns that would entail, I left them airgapped and had the facility managers simply unplug a flash drive, edit the menu on a desktop computer, and plug the flash drive back in when they were done. A quick power cycle of the Pi would display the new menu.