ZDNet Education

Christopher Dawson

My very own little project failure

By Christopher Dawson | February 13, 2009, 2:40am PST

Michael Krigsman writes a cheery little blog on IT Project Failures. Yesterday, I had one of my own. I probably shouldn’t call it a failure, because the real aim of the project (to switch two schools and the superintendent’s office to much higher-speed Internet connections) was accomplished. They’re all running on 7MBps cable now. It’s just that most of the clients couldn’t connect to it and now today will be a big ol’ Day-o’-Scrambling for another tech and me.

I ran into two different problems. The first, at the super’s office, occurred when our services integrator accidentally entered the wrong IP address for the firewall they installed to go with the data line. I said no problem and made a quick switch on the servers to point to a new default gateway. Shouldn’t have been a problem for anyone else, right? They were all DHCP clients, I’d shut down DHCP on our server, and had everyone reboot. A few people came back up and were uber-speedy. One was incredibly slow and the others were dead in the water.

The dead in the water were actually pretty easy. They were wireless and our wireless access point was looking at the old gateway. It also happened to be the connection for a networked printer. Now what was the IP address for that thing? Guess we’ll be resetting that one, eh?

Speaking of printers, none of them were DHCP. They were all pointing at the wrong gateway and had the wrong DNS settings. Ugh. Fortunately, the new firewall, an Astaro 220, has a great interface and I just switched its IP address to the correct one, switched the gateway information on the servers again, and printers and a few more clients came back up. I’m headed back there this morning as soon as I finish this post.

The two schools, on the other hand, had been migrated completely to static IPs for 60 laptops each and all teacher computers. Failing hardware and miserable bandwidth (replaced yesterday, yay!), as well as increased monitoring needs, necessitated the use of static IP. Of course, since our DNS servers changed with the new cable connections, nobody could get online. My tech sorted out one school yesterday afternoon. We’ll hit the other school this morning.

All in all, these aren’t huge failures. Given how unreliable access has been over the last couple of months, this is a relatively minor failure with pretty easy fixes. It does point, however, to the problems associated with rapid implementations of new projects. Sometimes, the planning component gets set aside for items that seem like easy turnkey solutions. Plug and play is great in theory, but no matter how busy we are (and us Ed Tech guys are usually not chit chatting about American Idol over the water cooler), it pays to sit down with your team and brainstorm possible hurdles and problems with any project.

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Topics

DHCP, Project Failure, IP, Server, IP Address, Michael Krigsman, Printers, Networking, Network Technology, Hardware, Peripherals, Christopher Dawson

Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems. In 2011, he became the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network SaaS provider.

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Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson is the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., by day and a freelance writer and educational technology consultant by night. Well, most of his colleagues at WizIQ are based in India, so really he's working with them whenever he can stay awake. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now owned by Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years). Follett is paying him a monthly honorarium to act as a presenter for their "SIS Voices for Student Achievement" community (he produces occasional blog posts and hosts a monthly webinar on the use of student information systems to inform data-driven instruction and school-wide change. He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he does) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have). Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as have Dell and Lenovo with their educational offerings. He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair. Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Adobe provided him with a pre-release version of the CS5 Master Collection for evaluation and ultimately provided a full, licensed copy for ongoing testing of educational applications of this admittedly expensive software. Like the Gunnars, if the license expires or they come out with CS6, he'd actually go out and buy it himself. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff. Finally, because WizIQ is a virtual classroom and learning network provider, Chris, as VP of Marketing, frequently interacts with, seeks out deals with, and directly or indirectly competes with a whole lot of LMS, SIS, and other Education 2.0 companies. In general, he'll limit his reporting about these companies to news that does not impact his relationship with them or with WizIQ. If he reports on them, it's because what they are doing is newsworthy or worth the attention of his readers and not because he's trying to broker some deal, damage competition, or otherwise advance his position in his day job. LMS and SIS companies, along with other online learning communities, are a pretty important part of Ed Tech. If he stops reporting on them completely, there won't be a whole lot left. He'll be sure to call out any overt conflicts of interest if they are unavoidable. Finally, Follett Software Company pays him a little tiny honorarium every month to present on their SIS Voices webinars and to write the occasional blog or discussion thread for them. Since Follett recently bought X2 (maker of an awesome web-based SIS that Chris just happened to have used, served in advisory groups for, and frequently reported on), this is probably also worth disclosing.

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You can still monitor DHCP

georgeou 16th Feb 2009

When the client grabs an IP address, they are logged
on the DHCP server. You can map the dynamic IP to the
client machine name by looking it up in the DHCP
server. Trying to manage static IP addresses for
clients is bad news.

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While I feel your pain ...

Ludovit Updated - 13th Feb 2009

... You must have had that little voice in the back of your head going "No, don't do it, don't say it" just before you said "No problem" and offered to change your network instead of changing the firewall ... and then the bigger voice saying "S#!+, what the hell was I thinking" afterwards ...

Ludo

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Doing it the hard way ....

Linux_4u! 13th Feb 2009

Ouch..... The Large static IP network, I will assume, has a NAT address setup. The simplest of all solutions, would have been to have all the computers's DNS point to the routers, since most Routers will act as a caching DNS server these days.

So all you would have to do is change the WAN IP and DNS's in the router and you would have been good to go.

That is unless you choose to completely change all IP's up on all computers...

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I had the same "failure" this fall

linkx 13th Feb 2009

I pretty much did this exact same thing in October for a 70-machine organization. I learned a lot about networking though!

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MBps?

gamefreak9310 13th Feb 2009

I'm sorry, 7 MBps? Maybe I'm just confusing myself here but isn't that slow? The computers I'm using right now at school say 1 GBps connection if I go to the task manager and I'm at a very small school that has a really horrible server...

Now, like I said, I may just be confusing myself here, but MBps is quite slow if I'm not.

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Speed of internal network speed of external access

dstein42 14th Feb 2009

Your computers are plugged into an internal switch that supports 1Gbps. Unfortunately, that switch is connected to the internet at a much slower speed.

Most schools run at most T-1 (1.544 Mbps) or fractional T-1 (e.g. 1/2 of a T-1 or 768Kbps). 7Mbps is actually very quick for a school.

There are a number of districts in an (unnamed) Southern State that have 1Gbps within *and* between buildings but only a T-1 for the whole district to access the Internet. Great speed if all you're trying to do is have all school computers point to piled of DVD-servers in the district office; lousy if you want students to reach Google!

One simple "consumer" site to measure your internet access is www.speedmatters.org.

Hope this helps...

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That makes sense...

gamefreak9310 16th Feb 2009

Yeah, thanks for clearing that up for me. I
should have thought of that myself... How'd you
get "Souther State" out of that? Yeah, I'm in
Texas if that's what you mean...

Anyways, yeah. Thanks for clearing that up.

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