What a day today! I rolled into the office at 8:45, and after a short meeting with my supervising manager, got to talk with Steve Hecker. Steve is a contractor with MPS, directly responsible for network design and management. After discussion of how the big picture is set up, from the end user back to Central Services and/or Capitol Drive, we took a short field trip to see how the voicemail and data servers are set up. WHAT AN OPERATION! Cables and servers are all labeled, all neat and clean, regularly cleaned and maintained. I was amazed at the level of organization for the cabling. Even the electric panels were color coded, so you know exactly what circuit and board each outlet is on! With some research, one could easily find a beginning and an end to each cable.
The afternoon was spent with Quinn Hammes, who is part of the Internet proxy team and backup team. MPS has several databases that need regular maintenance and backup. He did note that there are several Database Analysts employed, but the data entry is done by the teachers. With this, we dove into the different servers, and saw the backup schedules. There are many redundant features about these servers, for several reasons.
- If one crashes,the whole system does not go down.
- Traffic is kept even. Especially in high use times, like report card time.
- Maintenance is easier.
- Data Backup is easier.
He also explained how the round robin servers work, logging a person on to the opposing server every time they use the application. Now I understand how and why network traffic routing is so important!
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