wifi status update

You may have started to see some weird-looking electronic devices popping up on the ceilings your schools. No, you need not start wearing a tin-foil hat; we're not trying to read your thoughts. Each of these is a wireless access point (AP) that you can connect to with a laptop, iTouch, or your bathroom scale if you just happen to own one of these.

For the almost a year now we at the tech office have been planning, installing and testing the new wireless network at Oregon High School and Oregon Middle School. We are proud to say that we are now running at full speed in both locations.

What this means for you:
In your classroom at OMS or OHS you will now have network access for the many wireless devices that are either housed in your classroom, or that you may bring in from home. There are two wireless network names (SSID) being broadcast. The first one is called "osd" and the second is called "public". Any device that you bring from home may connect to "public" without even needing a password. All devices that are maintained by OSD, and have anti-virus software installed are set up to connect to "osd".

The difference between osd and public is simply this:
When you connect to "public" you will have the same access as if you were sitting at home(although filtered to meet CIPA compliance). You may connect to sites on the internet and any publicly accessible OSD sites (PowerTeacher, PowerSchool, Email, etc...). When connected to "osd" on a device owned by The District, you will have access to log into Novell and get to your files on the H, V, W,(...etc) drives.

eeePCs:
Most of these do not have antivirus software available, and are not regularly patched by OSD so the majority these will also connect to "public".

What about my building / classroom??
We have wireless coverage in all classrooms in OHS, OMS and RCI. So far we have limited coverage at the elementary buildings, but we're are working hard to get wireless where it's needed as soon as possible. If you're you're having trouble getting connected in your classroom at OHS, OMS or RCI please let us know and we'll get it figured out for you.

Thanks and enjoy your WPA2 AES encrypted IEEE802.11N-2009 2.4 / 5GHz connections!

Your friendly neighborhood IT department.



A final thought to leave you with:

“The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.”
-Albert Einstein

Server Maintenance

PVE is returned to service at 8:35 a.m. Sunday

PANTHER will now be shutdown to move from temporary location to the SAN

Slow logins at OHS- status, explanation

The helpdesk has fielded a number of complaints about slow logins from OHS. After researching the issue, our current theory is that the FreeNAS array currently holding the PANTHER server is slower than the regular SAN or drive arrays in the servers. PANTHER is being temporarily hosted on FreeNAS until it can be moved to the SAN. However, we can't fully migrate it until other arrays have been moved, which we were doing last weekend, but it took too long and had be be aborted.

In the meantime, the aborted PVE migration has been erased from the FreeNAS array, which increases the free drive space from 20 GB to about 300 GB. This should provide more headroom, which will hopefully result in a (nominal) improvement in login times. The only thing users can do is delete unnecessary files to make both individual profiles load more quickly, and reduce the overall disk load. This will also allow the migration to happen more quickly.

We understand this is frustrating, and we are working to correct the problem. It wasn't planned to be a long-term situation, and we're trying to progress to the final configuration (all volumes on the SAN) as quickly as possible.

Update [Sun., 2010-01-10, 21:55] Internet connection issues resolved

As of 9:55 PM Sunday, the district's Internet connection problems of the weekend seem to be resolved. The bottleneck seems to have been in the network packetshaper/traffic manager. It's supposed to throttle some traffic, but not all of it. (Sheesh!)

Internet access speed appears to be back to normal instead of the horribly slow speeds of the weekend. How bad was it? About as bad as the Packers' first quarter offense. (Thank you, I'll be here all night. Wait- no I won't. I'm going home now.)

Server Maintenance Schedule

Ongoing Server maintenance outages for Oregon SD:

Friday, January 15: PVE server migration beginning at 7:00 p.m.
UPDATE: PVE Server migration phase1 complete @ 9:30 a.m., Jan 16. Be advised that the server may be restarted at any time Saturday and will be shut down again Saturday afternoon for phase 2 moving of datastore.

Saturday and Sunday, January 16 - 17: Servers PVE and PANTHER will be shut down for indeterminate amount of time for move to faster (and permanent) disk storage.

MIDDLE School Server Shut down

The OMS server, "MIDDLE" will be shut down December 29 at 3:30 p.m. for maintenance and will be back in service on December 30 at 9:30 a.m.

Update: MIDDLE is back in service at 7:15 a.m. Thank you for your patience

E-Funds / MVP Banking

It appears that the site that E-Funds uses for online payments (mvpbanking.com) is having some technical difficulties. It is unknown how long this site will be non-functioning, but as of right now E-Funds online payments are unavailable.