We're on the down slope...

...or at least it feels like we are ! If you couldn't guess from my posts, last week was a tough week for us. But the team put in a lot of hard work and preparation and our first full week of wireless upgrades is going very smoothly ! (He says as he raps hardily on a nearby wooden table)

We upgraded Geology and Geological Survey on Monday, Psychology and Business Grad on Tuesday, Business (and SPEA Library) on Wednesday and they'll start connecting new APs in SPEA and Informatics in another hour or two. The Wells Library will be upgraded tomorrow, then we'll take a couple of weeks off to let the dust settle and resolve any issues before continuing the upgrades.

We did have a couple of small hiccups this week - both of which were resolved quickly. In Business, some of the power injectors that supply power on the ethernet cables running to the APs were older models that only supported "pre-standard" Power over Ethernet. The new APs do not support this pre-standard version, so we had to install some standard 802.3af power injectors quickly on the morning of the change over. Also, we discovered 2 APs in the SPEA Library who's datajacks are connected to an IDF in the Business School. This meant the old APs there went down yesterday morning when we upgraded the Business School instead of this morning when we're upgrading SPEA. We were able to get new APs installed there fairly quickly to get service back up. For those who don't know, the 2 buildings are joined at the hip and apparently some of the jacks in the SPEA building are too far away from the SPEA IDF, but close enough to an IDF in the Business School. Considering we have almost 1,000 IDFs and 60,000 data jacks, these minor oversights will happen every now and then.

We also ran into a minor bug on one of our WESM controllers yesterday (nothing service impacting). We got word last night that HP engineers were able to reproduce the bug and we're waiting to hear when the fix will be available. Thanks goes to our HP TAM (Technical Account Manager) for helping us pin this down quickly !