After around an hour, we cracked it!! Hurrah!
We had to check cables were wired correctly, check ISP settings, make sure the satellite link was receiving a connection and try many different configurations but we got there. With the fibre link also working between the hangar and the office, the PC’s were now also picking up their IP addresses from the firewall.
Now everyone could turn on their PCs, the pressure was on!
Fileservers needed to be communicating so they could get their files, database servers had to work for finance and operations for flight management, printers all had to be communicating and emails had to be coming through.
Emails to all the staff in Uganda are routed through servers in the UK. Whilst the office move was happening, this server in the UK was holding the emails until we went live again in the new office. We logged on and there were just short of 1,000 emails waiting to come down to the staff. This had built up over 4 days! It just shows you how busy our programmes can be.
After a full day of configuring servers, running round all the users helping them get set up, ensuring they can connect to things, print and access files, we were so glad we had got to the stage of a functioning network with staff all able to work.
At one point in the day, a spanner was thrown into the works by EMI upstairs turned on their server which started to also hand out IP addresses, so our PC’s started to not communicate properly as they had wrong IP addresses. We quickly realised and so unplugged their network from ours until we can separate the traffic on the switches to not conflict with each other.
This is a fun job for tomorrow!
While I was in the hangar helping some staff with their printers, I also checked in to see the Cessna 182 which has now had all of its vortex generators installed. It looks really neat!
The remaining things for us to do tomorrow will also be to get the Wi-Fi network up and running and talking to the unifying server and then to setup the VOIP phone system.
We hope that by the end of Wednesday, we may have just completed the office move from an IT perspective! Let’s hope and see!
We were invited to dinner at Simon and Pam Wunderli’s house this evening. Simon is a pilot for MAF and they have served in Uganda for 13 years! Amazing. It was great to hear their passion still for the programme after so many years. We had a lovely dinner and a cappuccino! Mmm, that was soo good!
