Dore Academy is a private school with very small class sizes serving Charlotte and the surrounding area. In 2012, when IT Mechanics first became involved with the school, they were located in two different buildings, both older, and neither designed for today's technology demands. The internal network was built out in pieces that were never part of a larger master plan. Switches and routers were located in a variety of places, including in drop ceilings, in closets, and in classrooms. Equipment was mismatched, and included 10MB Fiber Optic connections, 10 MB switches, 10/100 switches and routers, and gigabit switches. Wiring was mostly a mix of Cat5 and Cat5e, with the exception of the Fiber Optic portion of the network. When network problems occurred, they tended to be labor intensive to track down and correct.
The bigger of the two buildings that the school was housed in was also prone to flooding, and Dore Acacdemy had been told by the building owner that they would need to be out of the building. Work had been going on for a few years on raising money to purchase and renovate a much newer office building to be the new location for the School, and with the help of a generous gift from John Crosland, renovations to the selected building began in earnest at the end of the 2011 - 2012 school year. The plan was to start the 2012-2013 school year in the new building. This meant the entire school had to be packed up and moved in a very tight time frame as construction was not scheduled to be done until a week or so before school was to open.
IT Mechanics stepped in to manage the school's technology department in June of 2012. As we knew they were moving, our plan was to do only what we needed to the existing network to keep the staff that was working through the summer connected and productive. At the same time, we worked with Dore staff and administration, and with the contractor renovating the new building, to insure that the technology in the new building would meet their current and future needs, and to insure that technology dollars were wisely spent. During this time frame, we also took the opportunity to take all the student lab machines outside, open them up, and blow out several years of accumulated dust from them in preparation for them being relocated to their new home.
Approximately two weeks before school was scheduled to open, equipment started moving from the old building to the new one. IT Mechanics saw to it that staff could keep working right up until their desks and computer equipment had to be packed and moved, which was approximately one week from school opening. We were on site in the new location when staff desks and computer equipment arrived. As offices were set up, we lit up network connections based on desk locations, and brought people back online so some work could happen amid the chaos of the move. We spent long days much of the next week setting up four computer labs used by students, connecting printers, and troubleshooting oddball things that came up after the move. The school was able to open on time, and the opening was a huge success.
In the final days before school opened, the network went down one afternoon. This sort of problem had occurred at the old location numerous times before IT Mechanics took over, and I am pretty sure I heard a collective groan from most of the staff when this happened. The first thing we did was test the new network; we had internal connectivity, and the internal DNS server was up and running fine. Then next thing we did was to disconnect the internal network from the Internet connection, and put a laptop hardcoded with one of their routable IP addresses on the Internet. At this point, the problem became much clearer - we could not ping the default gateway. (The default gateway is your path to the Internet; if you cannot contact the default gateway, you aren't going anywhere.) We immediately called their Internet Service Provider, and explained the problem to them. The tech support person asked where we got the default gateway address from (I just LOVE calling tech support people....); we told them it was the one they had given to us when we started using their service. After several more silly questions, and waiting semi-patiently on hold several times, we found out that for whatever reason, their ISP did not have a record of the fact that Dore was using them as thier Internet Service provider, and the ISP had actually reconfigured their switch to remove Dore's Internet service. The good news was that we had a working Internet connection again within 20 minutes of the initial failure.
To add to the challenge of packing up and moving and entire school and bringing it back online within a week's time, the school changed their name from Dore Academy to The John Crosland School within a week of the opening. On the surface, this may seem like a trivial change, but taking everything that is @doreacademy.org and changing it to @johncroslandschool.org is a fairly challenging propostion. In addition to the external changes a domain rename brings (mail and website), there are internal changes, like reconfiguring all the clients' email applications, that must occur. And just to make this process a bit more challenging, it turned out that the two domain names were being held by different hosting operations. All in all, the process went well, and today, the former employees of Dore Academy are now employees of the John Crosland School, and are functioning with a new gigabit capable internal network, new short throw Smart Board projectors, and we hope and believe they are experiencing fewer technology related problems than they have in years past.
IT Mechanics continues to handle John Crosland School's technology operations, including updating and patching systems and software, handling IT requests from users, monitoring network equipment and usage, and assisting in the planning and execution of technology upgrades. We are on site several hours a week, and are able to deal with many things remotely. We can be and are there quickly for them if an emergency arises. We handle quite a bit of their website maintenance, and most of this is done from offsite, with their folks sending us the changes they'd like to have made. We monitor servers and switching remotely as well. Our goal is to keep them running as trouble free as possible, and to address issues as soon as they come to light, so that these folks can run their school without worrying about the technology behind it. Let us take the worry out of your technology and so you can focus on running your business.
