Settling in to a new school year

Well, all staff and students are back at school for another year. For the most part, things have gone smoothly (ish). Our one big issue was the wireless network - more about that later!

Some slight hiccups with creating new student accounts...turns out that we couldn't just import the same data that we could in previous years. After several fruitless attempts to import data from text files, we decided to purchase "Passenger" software (designed for just this purpose). Only problem with Passenger was that we couldn't get it to import the passwords for new users. Thankfully we had enough time (and a technician who didn't mind) to manually type the passwords for approximately 300 new users.

The rollover of Mathletics went OK, but we didn't get new usernames and passwords until after lunch on the first day of classes. Meant that a few maths classes couldn't use the program, but nothing major. The Maths faculty have now asked me to set up all year 7s and year 9s in QAX numeracy - another online system for doing NAPLAN-type testing. Hopefully the setup of this system will be finalised tomorrow (Monday 15th).

The upgrade of Studywiz to multiple servers hasn't progressed (my fault - too busy with other things). However, I have managed to get all teacher, student snd subject details into Studywiz without too much fuss. Given the fluid nature of students' subject choices at the start of the year, this is probably a process that will have to be re-done a few times. Must remind myself to do this first thing tomorrow morning!

I had a chat to one of our Deputy Principals on Friday (12th Feb) about the detentions system in our Student Records database. The College has a new Leadership structure, and they want to streamline the way detentions are done. They've given me until 2:30 on Monday to re-define the database tables and re-write all the scripting - this should be fun! Not!!

Our biggest headache so far has been the new wireless network. When installed, Shane (the HP engineer) and I walked the entire campus, and verified that the 802.11n coverage was pretty good. However, during the following week (1-5 February) when all staff were back, things starting falling apart pretty quickly. I was called in to the office at about 2:30pm on Friday the 5th (a day of annual leave), and spent until 11:45pm working with Shane (over the phone) working through the issues. The main symptoms were that we couldn't see any 802.11n networks (even though the controllers indicated the network was up), and that the controller itself became unresponsive, when logged in to the management interface.

At about 4:00pm on the Friday, Shane did a "factory reset" on the wireless controller, and began re-building it from scratch. Things were going OK until Shane enabled MAC address filtering (MAC auth) - suddenly the wireless controller started misbehaving, and becoming unresponsive to its management interface. Luckily, Shane was in contact with HP engineers in the US, who had also identified a Layer 2 transport issue, which would affect the beaconing of our wireless networks. It wasn't too long before a new version of the controller software was downloaded and installed. Shane continued working after I left (via VPN), and by about 3:00am we (supposedly) had a working wireless system. One of our techs went in to the College over the weekend to verify that everything was OK.

However, on Monday 8th Feb, when I arrived at work I still couldn't see 802.11n networks in some areas of the College. This was occurring in areas that we could previously see the network. It was almost like we had some kind of virus...was our wireless network infected with swine flu? Or, more appropriately dubbed by me, HPN1 (HP network, "n" networking on Radio 1)!!

Then, last Thursday, Shane found the specs for Apple's AirPort Extreme Base Station. Included was the information that in the 5GHz band, "Channels 1-13, 36-64, and 149-165 approved for use in Australia, Hong Kong, and New Zealand". We wondered whether the same limitation applied to Apple's AirPort cards...a quick confirmation from an Apple engineer seemed to confirm this. We also found some information from Cisco that these were the only channels allowed in Australia, however some info from the Australian Communications and Media Authority seemed to indicate that channels 100-140 (which are used by our APs) can be used in Australia, but only if using Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) - which our APs do. So, looks like the Apple wireless cards don't support the full range of channels in use by the APs - a situation we managed to verify by changing the channels on some of our APs.

So, the channels between 100 and 140 have been removed from the allowed list of channels for our APs, and they have had the entire weekend to re-adjust their power and channel settings. Fingers crossed that everything looks OK tomorrow!

Last, but not least...management has given us the approval to employ some additional help for a while. We couldn't find anybody at short notice, so we have arranged to hire one of the techs from our reseller for up to 40 hours. Hopefully, this will help clear some of the backlog!