Services Offered

TechSquare is a services oriented System Administration consultant group specializing in Unix Systems Administration. We can help you design and maintain your computer and network infrastructure, soup to nuts.

Service Contracts; long term and one-time projects
The majority of our clients contract TechSquare on an hourly basis. Support contracts are custom drafted to suit the needs of each customer. However, occasionally people just need help with a specific and finite project- installing new server, cleaning up a compromised machine, etc. We can accommodate both types of customers.

Typical Services Offered
Typical service contracts may include daily or weekly on-site office hours. This can range from a few hours a week to several hours a day, depending on your needs. With your service contract, we also include:

  • Remote Monitoring of your hosts and services from our NOC [network operations center]. This enables us to be proactive about problems with your site. Often we get notified about issues and fix them before anyone else even notices.
  • Security Monitoring of your hosts. This includes our homegrown filesystem integrity checker, rootkit detections, log analysis and periodic security audits.
  • Security Updates and Patch maintenance of all hosts. We keep up to date on the latest security vulnerabilities and fixes so you don't have to.
  • Backup and Disaster Recovery. We'll help you choose an appropriate backup and disaster recovery strategy and implement it for you depending on your needs.
  • Email Contact. We'll be the technical email contact for your user's, as well as, postmaster and webmaster if desired.
  • Emergency Contact. We can be on-call 24/7 for emergency support. Emergency rates apply for off-hours support.

    • Typical Hardware and Software Support
    We have extensive experience supporting a wide range of *nix operating systems as well as Windows variants. We do most of our work with various distributions of Linux, however, we do see a fair amount of AIX, HPux, FreeBSD and Solaris among others.

    We have extensive experience installing, configuring and maintaining:

  • Email Servers [sendmail, exim, postfix, qmail]
  • Email List software [Mailman, Mohnarc]
  • Web Servers [Apache, AOLserver]
  • Web Apps [CMS, Tomcat, wiki]
  • NFS [Network File Server]
  • NIS [Network Information Systems, formerly yellow pages]
  • DNS [bind]
  • Databases [MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle]

    • A Monthly Retainer of $500 is charged for service contracts with fewer than 10 hours per week of guaranteed work. There is no monthly retainer for contracts with 10 or more hours.

    Past One Time Project Examples
    Not everyone needs or can afford to have a SysAdmin on regular contract. With the high number of high-tech and dot-com startups there are always companies needing their first computing environment and no idea of what to get. We often get called in to recommend and install this initial infrastructure: network, servers, workstations, storage, archives- everything.

    After an initial burn in period the company may choose to hire their own SysAdmins. We can help with the interview process, evaluating candidates on technical merits and communication skills.

    Programming Tasks
    Occasionally we will take on small programming tasks for our clients. We've completed database backed web projects, and also perl, python and java coding for some of our regular customers. These projects are usually separate from the service contract and have specific pre-defined targets.

    Security Audits
    Computer security is a major focus of ours. We can help you identify weaknesses in your site's security and implement solutions. Our clients range from Financial Securities firms and high visibility e-commerce sites that use high-end firewalls to wide-open university labs with no perimeter filtering at all. For this reason, we follow network and computer security best practices from the application to the gateway.