IT Coordinators

As the IT Coordinator (ITC) of your research group you are the local IT expert in your group. You know the IT needs of your group as well as the IT resources your group owns, both self-managed and maintained by isginf, and what they are used for.

You are also the liaison between your group an isginf. If your group needs something from isginf it should be you who talks to us. We know you personally, any requests from you related to your IT groups resources are presumed to be in line with your professors interests. On the other hand, if we want something from your group, we will contact you or at least inform you when we work with someone in your group directly.

Services and Consulting

All we generally do and how is outlined in our service description. All these services can be directly ordered by you. However, everything can always be negotiated and there are few things we just cannot do. If you have the need for something IT related that we currently do not provide, then please contact Stefan Walter to find a solution.

Ticketing System

We recommend that you send requests via mail to support@inf.ethz.ch whenever possible and use the various request forms. All of these requests will be handled by our ticketing system. In the customer portal you can also see all tickets of the people your are responsible for.

Rights

As your groups IT Coordinator you get access to the following:

Sections on this website that are restricted to ITCs.
Access to the infcoord@lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list.
Our warehouse for picking up stuff and items from the self-service area.

Additionally you can request changes related to our services. Most common are the following:

Create, modify and delete user accounts
Configure network plugs (UTPs) in the rooms of your group
DNS, MAB and DHCP entries for networked devices (computers, printers, etc.)
Installation and decommissioning of servers, desktop and laptop computers
Create, modify and delete GitLab projects and Subversion repositories

Finally you are allowed to order IT equipment, request repairs and changes to the ETH inventory.

Do it Yourself

For your convenience you can management some things yourself:

user accounts with our online utilities
DNS, MAB and DHCP entries in netcenter.ethz.ch
group projects and access to them in gitlab.inf.ethz.ch
for receiving messages about activities in the ETH data network (such as network interruptions) you can register in message-subscriber
for finding out which buildings belong to a network zone, you can use the link buildings in network zone

You can always request isginf to do them but performing them yourself is quicker.

Tasks

As ITC you are expected to perform the following tasks:

Helping group members with simple IT issues, especially ones related to your particular IT environment.
Introducing new group members to the IT infrastructure of your group.
Financing software from the IT Shop for your group members in ETHIS (or assisting your administrative assistant with this process).
Collaboration with isginf in case of security incidents, inventory checks or changes to the ETH IT infrastructure with impact to your group.
Make bookings for Master's students who need a seat in the master thesis lab

Communication

Much of our communication with the research groups is through the IT Coordinators mailing list. It is up to you to individually decide whether the information that we send is relevant for your group or not. If it is you should forward the information to all group members.

Documentation

Some ITCs use the intranet website of their research group to document everything related to the IT needs, resources and environment. If you do not have something like this then we recommend to write everything in the section for information for research groups on our website. The topic of your group is automatically writeable for you and you can ask our service desk to create additional subtopics if needed. Access is updated every night. By default only users of class staff in your OU can read the information. If you need a different access policy, contact our service desk.

Getting Started

If your research group already had an IT coordinator before you we assume that a smooth handover has been done and you already know about the IT environment of your research groups.

In any case you should start by meeting the team leader (Stefan Walter) of isginf and get an introduction to the role. This is also a good opportunity to discuss IT related changes or improvements and meet the team.

Depending on which our our services your group uses you may want to get a crash course in: