Brian's World

Senate Webiage

Another posting of technical rantings.

I recently was given an overview of the student senate’s web services and servers. The servers themselves are very adequate and function but the network they run on is just not. Its not just the senate specifically, the whole campus network isn’t ideal. See other posts regarding the whole VPN deal.

As I understand it, all 5 of the senate servers connect into a gigabyte switch which connects into one 10Mbps line in the wall. Yuck. Voip, web, ftp, and soon to be digitial signage will all be driven by one 10Mbps jack. Given the load on any of these services isn’t huge, the big one being VOIP, I still see it as a hinderance. As I was made aware the SGS is broken up into several different network layers/subnets which adds more awfulness to the setup.

My ideas? Go multi-wan. Find an even older machine and fill it up with ethernet nics, and then run one nic to the switch and the rest to the various wall drops/wans. Sure, there might be some issues from .CIO’s end, but the more bandwidth the merrier. The last thing I want is to not be able to ftp because 2 people are placing a voip call.. or even my ftp kills their voip.

I’ve been chatting with MS tech support for the past hour or so trying to beat Vista into working.. so far no luck but “Terry” is trying. Just give me the hotfix.. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931770