January 2004 — Applications

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Affordable Network Management Solution Helps Novato District Make Technology Work for Its Students a

By Jan Langtry

Among the many challenges schools face today are tight budgets, growing enrollment and new demands from government. On top of these external pressures is a basic educational challenge that will be with us for at least the next decade. I am referring to the effort to prepare our children for a world permeated by technology. We have all heard it many times: Technological proficiency, especially the ability to use the Internet, is the equivalent of being able to read and write. It is a baseline skill that will empower today's students to become tomorrow's productive citizens.

More than 7,840 students in 17 locations depend on California's Novato Unified School District — located just north of San Francisco — to teach them these skills. My job is to make sure that teachers within the district have the proper support to provide their students with a positive computing experience. While fulfilling this responsibility, I've had many experiences that have taught me the best way to manage a network.

Network Traffic Control

I was recently confronted with a situation that required immediate attention when our district's Internet access crawled to a halt within a 12-hour period. Traffic analysis at our high schools suggested the problem could be the result of heavy downloads of large files. A friend in another school district suggested I contact Lightspeed Systems, a company that specializes in education technology solutions. I took the advice and ended up installing the company's Total Traffic Control version 4.0 (TTC v.4.0), which quickly taught me why simply monitoring the network had not been enough.

Upon installing the software, we were able to generate reports indicating that students and staff were running open music servers on the district's network, which opened our network to those outside. People from outside the district were actually using the network's bandwidth to download and upload files, as well as to traffic international spam. If we hadn't decided to invest in software with reporting capabilities, we never would have been able to get to the root of the problem in such a quick and precise manner. We were quickly on the road to a remedy, with the software increasing bandwidth utility and closing our network to outsiders. Now, our district is also better able to monitor and control content on our network because TTC v.4.0 contains an easy-to-use firewall.

In addition to restoring our Internet access and managing content, this software has had other positive effects. For instance, teachers from all disciplines feel more comfortable allowing their students to access the Internet because they know that we're helping to monitor them. The reports that the software generates also allow us to demonstrate compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). We use these same reports to help newer staff members better understand the network's flow of traffic.

Best Practices

This experience of monitoring and safeguarding the network has also helped me to better understand some of the following key principles for effectively administering a large network.