Some people might have noticed, probably a lot of people, at the start of this school year the network of the van Dooren Veste was not working like it should. Let me give a quick overview of what happend.

<!--more-->A network is depends on addresses to work, like in a city where a street name and a house number tells you what house it is gives the IP-address a device on a network a virtual location. Without that address the router doesn't know where to send the network packages needed for you to browse the web. What happened is that at the beginning of this year there where more devices then there where addresses to be given. Now most people start to think well just make more addresses and keep on giving problem solved. Well sadly this isn't that easy. A network consists of a range of addresses for example 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254 to be given to devices. And because of the size and complexity of the network at Hanze it's not just a case of going to the 192.168.2.x range. That is because all the ranges are given out for certain purposes. The range used for students has different rules and settings as the range for the server or telephone.

What the network administrators had to do was remap the network. The remapping of the network took 30 minutes. How ever getting to that solution took 12, yes Twelve, Hours this was because all the changes made had to be documented, approved, written down, approved again and then finally put into production.

Couldn't this been prevented?

Yes, this could have been prevented if the network administrators had monitored the network and analyzed the data.  Are the network administrators to blame? I don't think so, as far as I can see there are more students on this location and more people start to use the school network on their mobile devices as well, so instead of one laptop per person this is increased to a laptop, a mobile phone and possible a tablet as well. I just hope next time the network administrators act first get approval later. Then we, the students, can keep on working instead of waiting half an hour to get an IP-address.