We have the holidays coming up, and while we’ll all have a few days off our department will be in taking advantage of the quiet to work on some things. Our phone system is backed up by design in that it has a failover set of servers at the high school (the primary servers being in the middle school), but to be extra safe we’re going to be taking some static snapshots of the servers as well as testing the failover functionality. All this will bring the phone system down for a while, so we’ll be doing this between Christmas and New Year when all our offices are closed.
KWRL has just got some new data cabling in their offices here in Woodland to support IP phones. Over the holidays we’ll get a more powerful POE switch and UPS in place, and then we’ll be ready to deploy their new phones and begin the transition of migrating them over to our phone system.
We’ll also be catching up with more of the server upgrades we didn’t get to last summer. We’ve finished up the upgrades of our virtual server cluster, so now we can upgrade the actual guest machines. These are mostly just routine OS upgrades, but it will mean some downtime for key network services, so again the quiet time over the break will be helpful.
The transition to the new version of Sips is almost complete, I believe all our staff that make use of it are now using the new one. There are still some background tasks around importing data that are running on the older version, hopefully, there’ll be time during the break to move those over as well. After that, we’ll be able to get to some new functionality that folks have been waiting on.
And we’re currently installing the new Chromebox lab in the middle school. This will be available from January for staff to take their classes to, and will be used heavily come testing time, which will be here before we know it!