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What exactly is a NOS anyway?

With an Academic Commons Open House coming up this Thursday, I figured this would be a good time to formally introduce the folks who have been inundating you with blog entries and mass emails about network emergencies.

What NOS stands for and other facts you would likely have been better off not knowing after the break.

Networking, Operations and Systems

That's what NOS stands for. There's no officially recognized pronunciation of it but most of the folks in ITS and IR just pronounce it "nohz". So like this guy, just spelled different. My predecessor came up with the name in 2007. He's not around anymore, though. He had other talents and moved on to bigger and better things. So now, it's just us.

Who is us?

Excellent question.

• Wesley Hayato Tomatsu '01, Director of Networking, Operations & Systems
• Paul Hubbard '81, Coordinator of Network Systems
• Steven Bornn-Gilman '01, Senior Systems Administrator

You will note, aside from the fancy-sounding job titles, that we all have class years next to our names signifying the fact that we are all Oxy alums. Between the three of us, we have 50 years of experience working at Oxy. Add in the additional 12 years the three of us spent on campus as students and that adds up to almost 2/3 of a century.

So what exactly do you guys do?

Just about everything. There's the obvious stuff that probably leaps to most of your minds, like managing servers and networking equipment. But we deal with just about every aspect of the computing infrastructure of the college and because of that, we end up having a hand in just about everything that goes on here. If something goes horribly wrong in the middle of the night, one of us will usually be woken up as a result. We're not necessarily the primary movers and shakers on all projects but we're nearly always involved in some capacity. Want to know more about what we do? Stay tuned.