NCSU on premises journey

The story of all our meetings with OIT and whom we approached for firewall permissions etc. needs to be told so that other teams can follow in our footsteps. No detail is unimportant here. OIT is well aware that its currently a bit convoluted for research teams to build things like this so it is fine to be frank. We certainly have no one to bad mouth as everyone has been amazingly supportive, its just convoluted and they are eager to streamline.

Gregory Steffan helped us create servers on the vm farm with a subdomain under ncsu.edu (specifically, dronepilotdb.psi.ncsu.edu and dronepilotapp.psi.ncsu.edu). Gregory also installed the required software (nodejs, python3.9, git, etc) using puppet files. He also coordinated with comtech to change firewall rules for these servers.

Changing the firewall rules takes time - approximately 3 days since it needs to go through a lot channels

For a developer, Gregory has been a direct point-of-contact for everything. Gregory also helped us mount the sandhills research storage locker to the VM.