The CTO Project

Last week’s announced service improvements did not go as planned. No ETA on those, but I am assured folks are Working On It. This weekend, we announced a big bandwidth upgrade. This too failed to go off as planned. And I am assured folks are Working On It.

In both cases, the changes were promoted by us. The timeline was determined by us. Given that we were the drivers, there’s really no excuse for announcing a change unless we were 95% sure the service would work as promised. Particularly in the case of the network upgrade. Better to announce what we … Continue Reading

Yesterday, after submitting my budget presentation materials, I went to get coffee and mused about how I could explain to the budget committee (composed of staff, faculty, and students) our need for more bandwidth in a way they could understand. I was thinking about metaphors, about plumbing, about electricty, etc., when I saw the student newspaper. I got my coffee and sat down to read it. There, between a restaurant review and an opinion piece on Obama’s election, was the article “University facilities not up-to-date.” The author started the article with a complaint about hot water availability and then migrated … Continue Reading

My day started with my boss’s monthly 3-hour team meeting. I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting because I think no regularly scheduled meeting should last 3 hours This one ended early when an out-of-control car drove by our window on the sidewalk, crashing into parked cars, shrubs, light fixtures, and ultimately into another moving car. Students were screaming, etc. but no one except the driver was hurt. Still trying to figure out what happened there.

I returned to my office to get a call from my boss about how to embed a photo in a campus-wide alert. I assumed it … Continue Reading

When I arrived on campus, I noticed how few people carried laptops. I seemed to be the only person at meetings with a laptop, and this included IT meetings. Then I realized we didn’t have ubiquitous wireless. And then I realized that our bandwidth is saturated, even with our packet shaping tricks. And then I realized that until we increase our bandwidth, all of my visions for ubiquitous wireless, 802.11n pilots, VOIP, virtual computing labs, videoconferencing, etc. are doomed to fail.

Without the basics in place, you can’t really afford to be strategic. Or, I guess I have a strategy, it’s … Continue Reading

After last week’s outage, we’re revisiting our DR plan. It’s actually pretty good, and the scheme to activate our externally hosted alternate website for the school worked. However, there are two things to change. I noted them in my comments to Friday’s post, but I’ll make them a little more public here:

1. DNS TTL: our emergency site had a value of 30 minutes. This is too long. I think 5 minutes for the initial value, assuming we could change this on the fly if we felt the emergency site would be up for longer. We would like the real site … Continue Reading

Last night the school’s network died. Just enough to be ugly.