Most of the information pertains specifically to the building I work in as a Language Arts teacher. Edison Middle School is a three story brick facility, famous for its jazz band, athletics, and roaches. This building is over 80 years old, and was just recently networked, with a drop box placed in every classroom. I hope in this section to share the nut and bolts of our building's network structure, hardware, and software.

The Champaign Unit 4 District within the last 3 years has brought every classroom the ability to log into the internet. This "Access for All" philosophy was spearheaded by then Technology Director Barry Rowe, who now teaches Chemistry at a high school in our district. The funding for this philosophy was piggybacked with a referendum for building two new schools, technology receiving $2.1 million. When this funding passed, the district had funds to place a networked computer in every classroom. It also gave buildings the resources to install additional labs or minlabs. Currently our building at Edison houses over 200 machines. The majority of these are Macintosh based.

Our building and the school district receives its "access" through an ISBE facility located at the University of Illinois. This site interconnects our buildings with T-1 lines, running in a star topology. These lines provide outgoing access to the internet, while allowing inter-building traffic to stay local, not traveling on the public internet. Some building which are closely located to others, for example, our Administrative Center and an Elementary school, have fiber optic service, used to interconnect multiple distribution facilities. This service travels into our buildings, and all of our buildings are category 5 wired.

The bandwidth to our building, as I stated, is a T-1 line at Edison. This T-1 line will provide 1.56 Mbps service to the internet. Our inter-building traffic only supports 10 Mbps. This traffic is handles by our Cisco 3600 router, located in the network closet on the first floor near the middle gym. The T-1 line connects directly to the router, which is then connected to two distribution facilities. The MDF is located in the same room as the router. The IDF is located the the learning coordinator's office, connected to the router with fiber optic cable. The MDF handles the north end of the school, and the IDF the south. This second distribution facility was necessary for the size of building and the distance of many rooms to the main network closet. Many of these rooms were outside of the recommended 100 m spacing for effective communication. Each drop box in a classroom is linked directly to a connection in one of these two locations. As you can imagine, with a network this size, collisions of information slow network transfer, which now explains a good number of questions I had.

The only type of firewall protection our district utilizes is with the router. The Cisco 3600 has minimal firewall functions built in, attempting to halt intruders using ftp and telnet trying to access our buildings using domains other than our own set.

The servers within our building are in a few different locations. There is a separate server for library purposes in the library, and a small server for technical purposes in the Mac lab, but the main server is located in the same network closet as the router. The current server is overworked for the number of machines we are trying to run on our network. This server is going to be updated this summer to a Mac G3. The district has also moved from using the software At Ease to Mac Manager, which too will be installed this summer. This server not only runs its own system software, but AppleShare 6.1 for networking. Connected to this server is a battery backup for surges and power outages, and a tape backup system.

The back up procedure and policy of our district is a little different. First, the district rightly believes that every user is responsible for the "safe backup of their own critical data." Beyond that, the district has another level of data safety in a tape backup. There are only a few technicians within our district, so responsibility for this is placed on someone within our building. That person is an extremely underpaid computer tech. And the bigger issue here is that the back up is set to take place on a Saturday mornings. This complicates things since this tech does not work on Saturdays. Hence, when the server closes down for the backup, no one is there to complete the process. Teachers are left without access for the entire weekend until about 8:10 the following school day. I find this procedure extremely frustrating, knowing that myself and many others would like to come into our buildings and work on the weekend. Maybe this a roundabout method of deterring us from access.
 

Not only is the back up of the server a problem one might encounter in our building. Server crashes and machine crashes seem to happen all to regularly. I feel part of this issue is the lack of efficient hardware to run our network. An overworked server would probably crash, if it can routinely hand 120 machines and its being asked to do 200. If the server does crash, our building tech Roy or instructor Laurie Jacob are the first two people to notify. They will go an evaluate the problem. If the server merely was overloaded, and needs to be restarted, they will do so. If the problem is larger, they page a district tech to come over and assess the problem.

As for the issue of hardware malfunctions, such as hard drives failing, usually Roy handles the reinstalls. Each team of teachers has a tech representative within their team, and that person acts as the liaison for issues such as these. This eases the communication of needs within the two entities. If larger problems exist, a district work order is completed by the building tech and parts are ordered or a district tech may come over and assess the problem.

last updated 6.4.2000