Desktop Support
In the realm of our office facilities administration, the
office move in March amounted to a great deal of work. We were involved with
all sorts of dirty work on this project, climbing among the rafters in
the attic, laying phone and ethernet cable throughout the entirety of
our sizable new home. The timing was tight, but, miraculously, the
internet connection was delivered as promised, and on the first Monday
that everyone showed up to work, everything was functioning smoothly.
Since then there has been a slow and steady stream of improvements
made to the office network infrastructure. First, we received the
generous donation of a rack cabinet in which we housed our
office servers. Then we acquired a very nice HP ProCurve switch, which
replaced four other less manageable switches and greatly cut
down on the spaghetti strewn about the tech room. This was
followed by the addition of an office FreeBSD server providing some
simple intranet services, and a high quality rack-mounted UPS to
protect our server machines should power go out. Finally, we've
supplemented the ADSL connection that the office staff use for their
internet connection with an SDSL connection that provides much better
upstream bandwidth. We're currently configuring this new
connection, and soon we'll be migrating our office servers to use it.
On the desktop support front, we've watched as more office
space leads to more people working in the office, which leads to more desktops needing support. We're still
largely a Macintosh-based organization, and we've of course begun
supporting OSX on a growing number of machines. This is often a challenge since it involves upgrading machines and traveling the user learning curve. There are a few machines still running MacOS, however, and there is also a
small Windows-based subsystem that the Accounting Department relies
upon. It's not a simple feat, but we're happy to be able to accomodate all of these platforms
within our framework, and look very forward to continuing to grow in
new ways.
Submitted by,
Rob Miller
Technology Dept Lead
Click here to read the 2001 Desktop Support report.