Monday

October 4

I drove straight to Fouke.  On the way, it occurred to me that they were most likely having issues due to a loop in the network.  I called the co-op and had the technology clerk (Terry) ping the Fouke server from her desktop.  She was able to hit it, though it was intermittent. I then called the school to see if their distance learning system was still functioning.  It was.  These are both good signs.  It means that the problem is local (since we could see their server from outside their network) and that it was only affecting "data" traffic and not traffic on the compressed video side of things.

When I got to Fouke, we went to the core closet to start troubleshooting.  After quite a while (they have a LOT of connections coming into their core), we were able to isolate the problem down to the High School.  At the high school, we were able to further limit the trouble to the distance learning lab.  And, once there, we had it nailed down to a switch that had gone bad.  We swapped it out with another one, and started hooking things up.  Uh oh.  Still problems.  We narrowed it down to ANOTHER bad switch in the same room.  That was pure luck, fate, divine intervention, you name it.  After we swapped that one out, we still had an issue.  Turns out, there WAS a loop in the network at that second switch!  Once that was taken care of, we let everyone know they could get back online and we checked connections.  About that time, DIS showed up and we went to the core closet and he (Neil) began running a test on his Fluke.  While that was running, we went to the server room.

While in the server room, I realized I had left my phone in the car.  I got it and had a message from the office.  My server closet was running 90+ degrees!!  Whoa!  I left Fouke and immediately headed back to the office.  As I got close to the office, I got a call about a distance learning event coming up at 1pm (it was about noon when I got the call).  I tried talking our Distance Learning coordinator through the connection set up, but I could not visualize the core layout for DL and ended up at the office about 10 minutes until the program started.  Through some troubleshooting, we got the DL up and going but had no sound.  Actually, it turned out we had sound but the far end was muted.  On top of that, the far end was presenting too far from the microphone for most sites to hear.  I ultimately connected some powerful speakers to the system and made it through.  In the meantime, I was running back and forth to the server room to get the temperature down.  I believe I have it fixed, but won't really know until Tuesday morning.

I took a very brief lunch before heading back to the office to check email, answer voicemail, and take care of some E-Rate related issues.  One of the things I had in my inbox was a message from SLD about our PIA (Program Integrity something or other) review.  I had to answer five questions, and hopefully that will move our FY10-11 funds along!  Yes, we are still waiting for FY10-11 funds! UGH... I also called the air conditioner folks about a remote for the unit in the server room and for an instruction book.

And then, it was after 4pm.  Time flies!