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.

So it has been quite here for a while. That's because I haven't had time to blog or when I had time there was no inspiration to blog.

So what have I been bussy with:

• Getting back to school and getting used to the ritme, not much to talk about there
• Started with the HonoursProgram and got my first project assigned, will talk about that later.
• Trying multiple Linux distro's also will talk more about this later.
• Trying to get some work for my business

<!--more-->The honours program

So I have started the honours program this year. We started with getting a DISC assessment of which the results will come in soon. After that we got projects assigned. The first project was a project for THIALF and basically was about getting the data from the skaters visible in diagrams. This is not the project I am working on. The project I am working on is CAVE, Computer Aided Virtual Environment, the goal is to create an environment where demented elderly can relive memory's. More on this project in later blogs

Linux

I have been trying to make the switch to Linux and opensource software for a while now. I have tried Ubuntu but couldn't get satisfied with the interface. After that I tried Debian which I liked but thought it was to slow. After that I tried Mandriva and Linuxmint. Those two I realy liked but I went for Linuxmint since it's so similar to Debian but alot lighter.

 

So thats it for today hope to have more soon

Well apparently I was off-line this weekend. For some reason the website didn't respond for some time but now its back up and live again