Network switch brings changes to students, staff

Meg Lane/Staff Writer

Next school year the high school computers will be under some major changes.

Instead of having a ton of files saved on an overcrowded server, all the students and staff will be required to save their files onto USB flashdrives if they exceed the alloted space.

Part of what brought about the change in policy is that the district will be switching from a Novell Server to a Window Server.

“The Novell server is quite old and needs to be replaced. It was decided that the Windows server would better fit our needs,” librarian Kim Traw said.

Users to any building computer will be required to login as themselves to use the machine. Logging in to a generic “workstation only” will no longer be an option. Login names will be student ID numbers. Students will only be able to save to the server and will be limited to 30MB of space. Any student files saved to the computer or changes made to the computer will be gone when the computer restarts.

“It is a change that needs to be made. I’m sure there will be a few bumps when we start back to school in August, but I’m confident that in the long run the server will be more reliable and secure,” Traw said.

Extra server space will be given to those students enrolled in classes requiring extra space like digital photography and the engineering classes.

According to Traw, student files saved to the server now will be available after the summer. If students want to keep any of the files saved to the server, they need to save the files to a flash drive, CD or DVD and take them home.

Not everyone is pleased with the pending changes.

No one will be able to access the server from home next year. That feature might become available at some later date, but initially it will not be possible.

Teacher’s will also be affected by the server changes also. Teachers files will be moved to a new server and will be held at a limit of 200 MB of space.

Department server folders will no longer be there, but Traw reassured that student will still be able to share files with their teachers.