The school network has been poorly. Very poorly. We've been suffering from severe problems over the past few weeks.
The main problem we've been suffering from has been with the pupil profiles. In the past when a class has been using the suite (30 laptops), all the pupils would log onto the school network without any issues. Recently though, there have been errors whenever a group, or class, of children all try to log onto the school network. Some of the pupils received messages telling them that the AD domain was not available, whilst others were unable to find their own profile and were given the default pupil settings (minus the customised desktop we had set up for them).
We've asked technicians, and our ICTservice department, to identify the problem and been given a whole raft of reasons for it happening;
- We have too many pupils trying to log on at once - this is causing a bottleneck in our internet connection as the laptops call out to the LA ICT centre to download the pupil profiles
- If this is the case, why was it never an issue before?
- The wireless network cannot cope with so many demands on it at one go.
- Our wireless network was seriously upgraded earlier on in the year, following a LA survey, and we followed their recommendations with new access points and switches. Also, why does the problem also happen with the wired machines in the suite?
- The pupil profiles are corrupted
- The pupil profiles are "bloated"
Well, yesterday a technician was in school and rather than get on with his usual jobs, I asked him to sort the profiles problem. It took him nearly 5 hours, but he did eventually get to the root cause of the problem - and it seems to be that it was the last of the reasons we had previously been given. He identified that the pupil profile was a 10mb download - plus all the policy settings too - and managed to strip it down to just 1mb. That's a 90% download reduction for each machine logging onto the network (just what was in the profile that was taking up so much data??)
This Friday we will have another technician in school who will running a server script to all the laptops that should also remove all cached local profiles from the machines. This was another issue that was identified yesterday; the laptops are conflicting between their local cached profile setting and the main server setting, and this is causing some profiles to load incorrectly with the wrong desktops and program lists.
Maybe by next week we'll be running much more sweetly (fingers crossed) and be able to get on with the ICT we have already planned, although I have to say that today when the pupils logged onto the network in two separate lessons I led, there were no logging in issues.
As someone once said, when networks are working they're great, but when the don't...
