Electronics in the wiring closet

Just a few thoughts about switches and other electronics in your school wiring closets based on a district discussion I recently had:

* Check your environmental conditions - I know that some of you may not be able to immediately fix some of these problems, but it needs to be in your plans somewhere. If your wiring closet doubles as custodial storage, watch for the trend to use switches as a shelf for chemicals, etc. Some wiring racks double as a coat rack, which kills any hope of adequate ventilation. Switches today are more dense and, while it's a great space-saver, it makes proper ventilation an even more important requirement. In some cases, it isn't a coat covering the vents on a switch or server; rather, it's a thick layer of dust. Much like straightening up your patch cables, cleaning out dust on switching electronics is one of those tasks that always seems to wait until a better time. Too much dust can equal no ventilation and no ventilation can lead to equipment failure, which leads me to...

* Check your temperature - Most of these network electronics prefer a cooler temperature than would a human occupant. Nevertheless, there are countless closets where no dedicated cooling is in place. This is particularly important in data centers where racks full of network components and servers may be installed. This is the time of year where a lack of dedicated cooling can really harm a school district. Why? The school's HVAC system is heating the rest of the building and, in some cases, it's actually heating the wiring closet or data center. In some cases, the effect is seen immediately. Servers today can (and will) shut themselves down if sensors indicate that the environment is too warm. Other components like switches and routers may not fail immediately, but these components will have a shorter lifespan if regularly exposed to excessive heat. Also, don't forget about these electronics that may be left on while a cooling unit is shut down (for summer break, for example).

* Check your battery backup - Honestly, the bigger issue in many cases is that some outlying wiring closets don't even have battery backups for switches and network electronics. For those that do, I've heard many reports on UPS devices failing quite often. The UPS battery is seen as a money pit. Why do they fail so often? If the environment is too hot, the UPS can be significantly degraded. In fact, according to this APC white paper, some batteries experience a 50% reduction in life for every 14.4 degree temperature increase over optimum, which is about 77 degrees. This paper also discusses the number of discharges and the rate of charging as factors in UPS life. There's some good info in the white paper. The bottom line is to understand that proper battery backups are needed but that their life is impacted by the same factors as other network electronics.

At any rate, this was on my mind after meeting with a school district this week. Hope it's of some interest - take care!

ADManager Plus

Just a quick note to mention a product called ADManager Plus. John McMillen shared this product with our regional group today and gives a detailed review of his experiences with the product in his blog.

ADManager Plus is simply a tool for Active Directory management, assisting technicians with template-based user creation and mass creation, editing, etc of accounts. It's a tool to make your technicians' lives easier.

In general, I would state that this is an area where many technology staffs could use some improvement. School districts invest in so many instructional packages for their students and teachers. Ideally, this should increase knowledge and make better use of everyone's time. The same logic needs to be applied to an IT software toolkit. Often, the tech staff is so focused on saving money and living on a shoestring budget that they may not even consider investing in a tool like this.

Products like this are a reminder to occasionally evaluate the tasks that consume the majority of your time and search the landscape for products to make those tasks easier.

Common Craft

I'm not sure if you can make use of this service but, if not, you can at minimum take some of the spirit from Common Craft in your own creation of instructional content.

Common Craft is a simple and interesting concept. They take certain relatively complex subjects and create videos of roughly three minutes to explain this concept. It sounds simple enough, but it's obvious that a good bit of time and effort resulted in each of these productions. You can view their content online and can purchase individual or site licenses to use these videos in your own environment.

Their topics include technology items such as cloud computing and Twitter search. (As an aside, the cloud computing video might be a very good way to explain hosted email and other services to your teachers and staff.) There are also money concepts like borrowing and saving money and social concepts like the process of electing our President.

...and what video library would be complete without knowing how to deal with a zombie attack. :)

Cybersafety for Parents and Kids

A good instructional video posted by the KY Attorney General's office. Some good overall cybersafety tips and facts in this video:

Unrelated 4-letter-words: Mint and Yelp

While searching around for some highly-rated Web 2.0 tools, I ran across two that caught my eye. They are completely unrelated to one another - unless you consider that one was bought by Intuit for $170M and the other was almost purchased by Google for $500M. The sites in question are Mint and Yelp.

Let's start with Mint. Though I haven't gotten brave enough to try it yet, Mint touts itself as the "best free way to manage your money." Apparently, you plug in your banking account information (accessed via 128-bit SSL on the browser and encrypted credentials stored by 256-bit AES) and the software does the rest. It's a read-only view into your finances, whereby the software creates charts, graphs and suggestions regarding money management. The concept is pretty interesting and it seems that Intuit saw some value there as well.

Yelp appears to be a clearinghouse for local business reviews. It has compatibility with most mobile phones and allows users to search for local restaurants, dentists, entertainment, etc in various cities. Yelp users write reviews and this gives the site a very 'local' feel to it. The site appears to search your IP address and change your default search city to one nearest the location of your registered IP address. Business owners can create Yelp accounts to offer discounts and can purchase ads from the site.

I'm new to these sites and thought I'd feature them - perhaps some of you are regular users of these tools... Take care!

"Financial Football"

I saw this featured in an eSchoolNews article. It's an interesting partnership between the New York Comptroller, Visa and the NFL. All of the details are in this press release.

The link to the game is here and I naturally had to try it out. It's very informative. I'm all for anything that will give our youth an increased knowledge of money management and financial skills.

Since it's licensed by the NFL, you get to choose from actual NFL teams. I tried the 'college' version, which times your answers and allows you to choose from easy, medium or difficult questions. Each correct answer earns you appropriate yardage based on the difficulty of the question. An incorrect answer allows the opposing team to attempt the same question, leading to a sack or lost yardage if they answer correctly. Four downs, extra points, kickoffs and field goals are all part of the game. Very cool, educational and it kept my attention.

The state of New York has a more general money management site here.

OET webcast equipment

Each month, our staff travels to a different school district to conduct a webcast. They share information with school districts about any number of technology topics. I regularly get asked about the components used during our technology webcasts. I'll do my best to give some details in this blog entry.

We use Windows Media Services, part of W2K3 SP1, on the server side. Our folks recommend 2GB RAM on the server and plenty of disk space for video archiving. We hook our camera up to a workstation that has either a USB or firewire port, at least 1GB RAM and we use the Windows Media Encoder software on that workstation. We also use Wirecast software. This is a fee-based product, but a product like this is a worthy addition if you intend to produce or edit your webcasts after recording. This software is what we use to add the "email questions to..." banner at the bottom of the screen. We also use this for some of the "upcoming webcasts" slides and items of this nature.

As our webcast operators have told me, the audio quality requires more effort than does the video. The camera we use for the webcast is a decent camera, but no different than what you might already have in your own school district:
We use three microphones made by Audio-Technica. The model we use is the U851a. I turned one upside-down to get this photo, though I'm pretty sure they perform better right-side up. :) To the right, there is a picture of the power sources for each of the three microphones. This was during setup and each of these three feeds will eventually be plugged into an audio mixer.








The particular mixer we use is an Azden FMX-32. I'll include a few different views of this product, but we're essentially running the three microphones to each of the three channels. Each channel has its own volume, etc. I'll also include a picture of the side of this mixer. There are different sources and types of outputs and you wouldn't use them all, but this mixer would need to be connected to an audio source on your webcast workstation. Pictures below of the top, back and side of our particular audio mixer:
I'll go ahead and include on picture of the side of the workstation. In our case, we use a PCMCIA-based firewire connection. We could use the firewire port built into the workstation or we could even use a USB-based connection. The PCMCIA connection is known to work and perhaps provides a more physically stable connection, as the last thing we need is to drop that connection during the webcast.
I'll include one final shot of the camera we use, with the external microphone attached. This camera also has an internal hard drive. According to our recording staff, this would give us an absolute worst-case scenario whereby we could still maintain and save a production. The external mic is also an audio source (in case the mixer/mics fail) and the internal hard drive of the camera is also recording the webcast (in the event that we lose connectivity to the server, our stream fails, etc).
I'm not an expert on webcasts and I don't necessarily endorse any of these products over any others, but I did want to take some time to show the specific components we use for our district webcasts. I hope this is of some benefit. Take care!