Busy Day, Busy Week

First, I have an assistant.  A friend of mine, Carl, was hired on, starting yesterday, as our new Network Technician.  Officially, I’m his supervisor but as far as I’m concerned, we’re a team on equal footing.

Carl and I went to the Lawton office today.  Lawton is about a 2.5 hour drive each way. We went to install a video conferencing unit and some backup software.  Everything went very smoothly, especially with Carl there. 

Carl earned his keep twice today.  First, I was looking at installing a new network jack and as I was considering which end to start from and contemplating the mid-wall turn I was going to have to make when Carl said, “Why don’t you just split the cable?”  See, up to 100 megabits (it’s a measurement of signal speed/bandwidth), only four of the eight small wires gets used for signal.  So, I cut off the existing jack (they’re not really re-wireable) that was wired with all 8 wires, split the twisted pairs and wired in two jacks.

The second time, I was installing the $50/license backup software and it popped up and said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Sorry, you need the server version.”  The server version is $400/license and does much more than we actually need.  I thought we were buying a version that was just not quite as feature-rich… not one that wouldn’t work if we were using a particular operating system.  So, as I sat looking at the web site trying to figure out if I missed something (I did), Carl suggested that we simply share the right folders – something we were already doing – and use a different computer (with a different operating system) to actually perform the backup – which we did.

He also proved his worth.  He put together the small table we had as a TV stand while I wired the jacks.

Tomorrow, we’re going to spend quality time at the new office locating jacks.  They are all labeled but there are multiple jacks in each plate and I just want to be sure.  Last night we had a meeting and found out where we would all be in the new building so now I know which rooms I must have active by Monday.

The rest of this week will be filled with relocating and setting up at the new digs and helping others do the same.