April 1996 — Features

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Tips & Tricks for K-12 Educational LANs

PHILIP HESS, Computer Technician, North Hills School District, Pittsburgh, Pa.

One way to improve network performance is to increase the memory allocated to the cache on the file server. However, be alert for the "plateau effect," where the server and network's performance plateaus and increasing memory to cache gains very little. Once you reach this, reduce the amount of memory allocated to the cache down to when the plateau begins to occur.

Often you will have no test equipment to help track down network problems. A tried-and-true method is the "divide & conquer" approach, which works with or without test equipment. Divide your network into smaller and smaller segments until the problem is isolated. Once the problem is solved, reconnect everything in reverse order that you took it apart and you're done.

A related technique is to drop machines off the network one by one until the problem g'es away. The machine you just took off the network is usually the culprit. Look for loose connections, cards not properly seated or breaks in network cables, especially around connections. Substitute the suspected faulty part with a known working one to determine if your prognosis is correct.

Use the Groups function of the networking software to cluster your users. On the Macintosh network at my school, there is a Children's Group (all computers in the lab) and a Teachers Group (all teachers in the building). Each teacher has their own private folder into which they save work. They can log into the LAN from any computer and work with their files.

Don't forget to set up a user for yourself and include it in each group. This way you can log in as a member of that group without having to ask someone to reveal their password. On my school's network, I made several users for myself that allow me to access different resources. If I'm working on a problem and get called away, the network is protected from "exploring" by students.

Philip Hess was computer technician for Seville Elementary School in North Hills School District in Pittsburgh, Pa. He is now student teaching at McIntyre Elementary, in the same district, and will earn his masters in Elementary Education in May 1996 from Duquesne University.
E-mail: philip@nauticom.net
Home page: www.nauticom.net/www/philip/

References:
1. Taken from Tidbits #266, a Macintosh newsletter delivered by Internet e-mail, published by Adam C. Engst. For more info, send e-mail to: info@tidbits.com
2. Call (800) 505-0171 and request document # 20702, Apple's "Software Installation Over a Network" sheet.

Products mentioned in this article:
SurfWatch; SurfWatch Software, Inc., Los Altos, CA, (800) 458-6600, www.surfwatch.com
Net Nanny; Trove Investment Corp., Vancouver, BC, (800) 340-7177, netnanny@netnanny.com