Some steps forward at Saints
This week has been reasonably peaceful - work at Saints is going ahead very well. I've mentioned before the problem that they only have a 384k internet connection (the residential standard in the UK used to be 512k, now it goes from 2Mb upwards) shared between about 40 computers. When multiple computers connect to the internet through such a connection the results are unpredictable, often with one user hogging all the bandwidth (through no fault of their own) and sometimes leaving a practically unusable service for the rest.
We have now installed a proxy/caching server which allows us to:
- Restrict the bandwidth available to each user, so no individual can take too much
- Monitor the websites users are visiting - and manipulate their bandwidth. During busy times for example, we can block or slow down "non-essential" sites like Facebook and Hi5 as downloading all those pictures doesn't really help with anyone's work. Slowing down the connection to these sites allows more speed for other users.
- Cache web content - in other words save web pages locally (and automatically). This means that every time someone visits a site, if someone else has visited it within a given timeframe they are served a local copy. Instead of 30 fresh connections to yahoo.com, there's just one and the rest use the same copy
It's had a few teething problems, including internet access not working and being intermittent, although from what I gather the service wasn't that predictable beforehand. Having said that, what is now in place will hopefully improve the quality from sometimes useless to always useful!
The next step is to re-install and lock down the computers. Currently they have all kinds of stuff installed on them, some run slow and so on. We'd like a system whereby every user has a login and is given their own file space on a server that they can access from any computer. It will probably take a bit more wrestling with Windows Server 2003, but we'll get there! Hopefully this will make the IT department a much more effective resource, and the holy grail would be to have a functioning intranet and email server, but this will take some time!
