Patrick’s Rants

I walked into work last Thursday and was told that the network was down. There was no internet access, nothing. We have a “departmental server” which holds such things as departmental data, but it does little else. When the network is down there are some interesting things that happen. The work is only about half done on the configuration over there. All of our login and authentication is done by the PDC (perhaps AD?) on a server in another building on the other end of a Cisco wireless bridge. It was the bridge that was down; the other end had effectively melted down. Slowly but surely our machines in the office have their dynamic IP addresses expire (7 day lease time according to one of the tech guys who showed up later) so no one notices right away when their logon to the server goes down. The internet though is noticed right away. So too are the remote logins to the district software: accounting and student database. And the network printer stops working as well.

After the tech guys - nearly the entire department - arrived to work on our stuff I learned a number of things:

1. Our server is not a BDC, doesn’t authenticate users, offer dynamic IP addressess, or even have the same user names as the PDC - it probably should be a Backup Domain Controller
2. The network printer stops functioning because of a “legacy IP address” - it was assigned a public IP address when every device had a public IP address at a time when everything flowed through NAU
3. The printer IP address, and of many other printers, has not been switched over to the private network within the district because it would require reconfiguration of the finance software in the district
4. Currently, the public IP address is magically routed at a switch in the district office back to the right printer - print jobs head out through the wireless link, bounce through the tech services building, through the administration building where the switch directs it back through tech services back over the wireless link and finally to our printer
5. Our tech services department is understaffed - they could use some help building out some of this redundancy, but they have to work on an “if it aint broke” schedule