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October 2, 2006
Bookstore Rush Week - No Problem!
Last week was rush week at the Bookstore. This is a time when our system is put through its paces, and also has been a time when we have had some hardware problems. This year, though, we lucked out. Earlier this summer we noticed a substantial slowdown at our cash registers. This was odd since there was very little activity either at the bookstore or in the WUC center. Well, a chance visit to the computer lab downstairs revealed about six kids playing "Rune" on the thin clients there in the lab. Whoa, we don't want six lab machines to slow down the entire network. Bill and Paul helped me to sort out the source of the problem, and Bill upped the switch capacity from 100 Mb to 1 Gb and that was that. There was no noticeable slowdown in the network during the entire rush week - Yes!
The second thing that happened - during new student week this time - was that yet another of our Zoom modems malfunctioned. This time the power switch broke and would only stay in the off position. It worked fine so long as you were willing to stand there and hold the button in, but of course that wasn't very practical. We have two of these modems - one is used for credit card verifications and the other for MBS to dial into our POS system. So, Kristi switched the dial in modem over to the credit card system and we were back up and running. You may recall that about two years ago this same thing happened but the back up modem only lasted about one hour, then it also failed. And that was during rush week - what a mess! Well, we overnighted a replacement in and there were no problems.
Of course this story wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention that one of our spare cash registers refused to boot up. After making a few phone calls it was determined that the receipt printer was sending out an error message. I replaced the paper roll and did a few other tweaks and got that last register online and it performed quite well this week. One of our goals is to replace these registers over time with some newer ones.
Bottom line - the system ramped up and met the load of rush week without any problems. I love it when a plan comes together!
Posted by rossm at October 2, 2006 9:05 AM
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