Day From Hell
What a day… I don’t want to tempt fate, but I don’t think it could have got much worse.
7:20 - Wake up. It’s raining.
7:40 - Leave house (yes, ten minutes late - was up late night before trying to make Moodle faster)
8:40 - Arrive at work (the thirty minute drive took an hour, bloody traffic)
8:45 - Get to office, notice 8 messages on answer phone and suspect something might be wrong.
That was an understatement…
We can probably break our ICT Systems at RMGS down into the following key sections:
- Admin Network
- Curriculum Network
- Internet Access (via Medway Council’s WAN)
- E-Mail (via Medway Council’s WAN)
- SIMS
- Wireless Network
- Moodle
- Exchange
- Staff Laptops
- Interactive Whiteboards and Projectors
When I got up to the server room and found Sam; the curriculum network, the admin network, Medway’s WAN and SIMS were all down. Moodle was knocked out as well because its externally hosted and so requires internet access (not that this mattered, if no-one could log onto the system in the first place).
We set to work trying to fix the two networks, the night before we’d replaced a switch, and despite unplugging things from one switch, and plugging them all back into a new switch - somewhere along the line something wasn’t happy. The result was some very odd network glitches that made absolutely no sense. Lots of fiddling (about an hours worth) later, things seemed to be back to normal - not that we’re any the wiser why.
Things still aren’t perfect, some random admin machines are getting curriculum IP addresses, but that’s a job for tomorrow!
SIMS was a different kettle of fish, and that’s not our problem to fix. EIS had tried to install the latest update the night before, and insodoing appeared to have broken it not only on the server, but in such a way that we have to reinstall it on every single client. Manually. Since the internet is down they can’t work on SIMS remotely, so we are graced with the presence of an EIS engineer, who spends most of the day trying to get the server back up and running. Its now running, but we still don’t have the update that we needed in the first place.
The wide area network issue was also not our problem; we just had to wait patiently whilst Medway blundered around trying to fix it. It did come back, about 11:00. That takes us up to about 80 hours of unplanned internet downtime this term due to Medway Council.
As if all this wasn’t enough, I was supposed to be in the hall all day helping with Christmas Concert rehearsals, as well as dealing with a number of different serious behavioural issues that involved ICT, as well as starting to decorate our new office, as well as install the newly arrived printer, as well as sort out the asset register which appears to lack about 75% of our resources, oh – and today is the Careers Convention where lots of untrained and unprepared speakers want to use our whiteboards and projectors and need our help to set them up. That’s not to mention our normal job!
16:40 – Leave work.
16:50 – Arrive at work (Other work –
18:10 – Leave work
18:40 – Arrive home – Rest.
19:30 – Blog
20:00 – Start work, since stock valuation and the latest CCS update have broken. (yes, another job… another story… another time).