School rewire. IT contingency planning.

[speckytecky]

We have a major rewire of the school happening in the Summer. I have not lived through one of these before!! What planning can I put in place to preserve the network and ensure services continue. I'm told that there will be staff needing network access during the period of the work. I suppose the good news is I have been asked at an earlyish stage and can ask for inclusion of such as a filtered supply to the server room.

[plexer]

Electrical re-wire I take it?

 

Ben

[Pete10141748]

Best of luck with it, over the course of the building work here (a massive rebuild of over 50% of the school and adding more) it was initially the plan that the network would still need to be accessible. After weeks of meetings, some work beginning and cables starting to come out / power being shut off the SLT realised that it just wasn't feasible to have all-access all the time while the work was going on. We did the best we could but we ended up with areas of the school with no power / no network for weeks at a time, people had to move to another area of the school if they wanted to get online / check email / google etc.

 

Get printers set up with USB cables if the area they are in will likely not have power to the switch they are connected to, try and make sure that the server room has power at "high capacity" times of the day, but really the best way to avoid problems is to pre-warm people that they might lose access, may have to move to another area in the building for certain tasks, etc.

[glennda]

If you mean remote access during the holidays what UPs's do you have? you might be able to get some temp air-con units and extension leads to a UPS if you have a decent one with Commando socket inputs and run it off generators

 

t

[speckytecky]

Sorry Ben - yes that's the one.

 

Electrical re-wire I take it?

 

Ben

[pete]

Write it into the contract that on A-Level & GCSE results days (and the day before), power must not be interrupted to anything required to process results.

[speckytecky]

UPS wont be adequate we are talking of the juice being off for days not hours.

 

If you mean remote access during the holidays what UPs's do you have? you might be able to get some temp air-con units and extension leads to a UPS if you have a decent one with Commando socket inputs and run it off generators

 

t

[plexer]

Generators it is then

 

Big ones. Diesel.

 

Ben

[nicholab]

One thing we had a problem that two summers ago the school was having it's supply uprated and the generators where not allowed to run 24x7 they were started up at 0800 and turned off at 1630h. Also if it is just internal they should be able to do your feed to the Server room 1st and switch it over quickly. The SMT are mad if they are allowing staff in to the building it is so disruptive with no power they should stop staff coming in.

[K.C.Leblanc]

UPS wont be adequate we are talking of the juice being off for days not hours.

 

Have you considered relocating your servers and some of your workstations to another school over the summer holidays.

[glennda]

One thing we had a problem that two summers ago the school was having it's supply uprated and the generators where not allowed to run 24x7 they were started up at 0800 and turned off at 1630h. Also if it is just internal they should be able to do your feed to the Server room 1st and switch it over quickly. The SMT are mad if they are allowing staff in to the building it is so disruptive with no power they should stop staff coming in.

 

Hireable generators should be able to run 24/7 at near silent speeds - they are designed to do so and as long as you get a decent fuel cell it should be fine and no/low fire risk.

[Duke5A]

I've been in this boat, and even if you write it into the plans that area A is supposed to be on at time X, and area B at time Y, it isn't going to happen. The work will get started, and you'll quickly learn a new dirty phrase, Change Order. Pack your people up and move them out of harms way. Trust me, it'll save you much grief.

[speckytecky]

Thanks Duke5A and the rest of you with useful replies. It looks like the best option is establishing the Servers in a remote building on the site which is away from the main building and having a limited service from there. That said the access for the broadband is in the main building so I'm stuffed as far as that goes probably anyhow. What I'm thinking now though is having been asked whilst this is still in the planning stage to get some decent network cabling put in whilst this is all being done - I suspect that in order to comply with various regs the current grey coloured Cat5 will be replaced by them anyhow. We haven't in reality got a decent set up when it comes to network switches several long Cat5 runs that have got to be well over 150M between daisy chained switches so probably need to look at that as well.

[GrumbleDook]

Write it into the contract that on A-Level & GCSE results days (and the day before), power must not be interrupted to anything required to process results.

 

Good practice for this is for no change to be made after 12 noon on the Monday, which allows for Monday afternoon and all day tuesday to try to fix any issues should they arise. The system should need to be working from first thing on Wednesday on both weeks and this will give a buffer in case something goes wrong. If this means that they scrap any work in those two weeks then so be it.

 

Also remember that a lot of IT access is generally needed now for students looking to go through clearance and downtime due to electrical work can affect this whether it is on the friday after A Level results or if you run your email in-house as it will be needed on almost permanently for the next week and a half.

 

Also, with a growing number of year 11 students looking at other educational institutes or apprenticeships then they too are likely to need a lot of IT access after their results.

[Sandman]

Generators..... Power extensions...... Wi-fi hotspots + hubs ....... to be honest it sounds like it's one of those ones where you will have to plan for the worst.

[john]

Having been here at easter (well close enough!) Entire new switch room and 40% of Dis-Boards changed / replaced meant no power for 2 weeks (and it was nearly 2 weeks and 1 day as I was still on-site at 2AM waiting for the last bits of electric to be returned, that was 2AM on the day we re-opened to students at 8AM! They can probably supply your data rack with a temp supply we got one, it cost but it was agreed, that way at least you can work remotely from home which is what we did to the best of our skills, as my photos that friends saw they know how good a 4 way lead was and my temp desk in the corridor where we had power. Certainly well worth talking to all those involved and making them aware of all the issues it could be as some SLT just don't get exactly what 0 power means until it happens. I know of one that said oh its fine we don't need to come in to work as we can work from home remotely..... (the penny didn't drop that quick to alert them to the fact of 0 power on-site = no workey from home either!!)

[hit]

"isn't that what those UPS things are for? You know, uninterruptible power supply that cost a couple of grand last year" was what fell out of one of my heads mouths when we had two days planned outage for a new distribution board, yeah sure, it'll hold up for a couple of days, NOT! ^_-

[WithoutMotive]

This happened for us over Easter, too. I suggested when and two weeks earlier announced to the staff that servers will be off at that time, no question.