On Monday January 28th and Tuesday 29th West Morris School District experienced an internet outage that shut down staff and student wifi.
The internet outage occurred the Friday before on January 25. At approximately 11pm, Mr. Milone, the network administrator at West Morris, was getting notifications from the Meraki dashboard, an online panel that controls the schools technology systems, that the internet was going down.
When the tech department arrived at the school that night, they noticed the internet core switch was malfunctioning. “It’s a brain that controls all the networking routes and directs traffic” said Mr. Dougherty, The technology director for West Morris.
Mr. Milone worked from 11pm to 6 am that Friday at Mendham in an attempt to get the internet back up and running. Mr. Milone switched off with Mr. Hanish, the systems administrator and Mr. Dougherty, the technology director. They got the internet back up and running around 3pm.
Unfortunately, the switch shut down again by the time the team got back to Central to get everything running. According to Meraki Support, the maker of the core switch, the core switch suffered an internal fan failure. The company Meraki had a two day timeline to send a new core switch. “Unfortunately, with the core switches you can’t just easily copy everything over, you have to manually put all the routes in” Mr. Dougherty said. This made the fix even more complicated and a more lengthy process.
The internet was fixed Tuesday night and ready for faculty and students to use Wednesday. Mr. Dougherty thanks the faculty for their patience and understanding. “If I was in their shoes I’d be frustrated but there was a lot of understanding” said Mr. Dougherty. He noticed many teachers were able to adapt on the fly and work with the challenges of teaching without the internet. “When Mrs. Astacio-Banda and I were walking around, we still saw teachers that gave them job teachings and kids were learning and having face to face conversations in the classroom which I thought was pretty cool” said Mr Dougherty.
It was truly a team effort to get the internet back up and running and making do without the internet. “I feel like my teachers were pretty prepared and utilized physical texts,” said Bella Pervan, a senior at WMC. The superintendent, Dr. Sargent, did her part by borrowing 20 or so internet hotspots from Newark Technology Academy. Mrs. Astacio-Banda helped by creating videos for teachers to inspire them to continue education without technology. Mr. Milone, Mr. Hanish and Mr. Dougherty contributed to the team work by working long days and through the night to get West Morris back online.
Mr. Dougherty believes the best thing the department can do is work on ways to prevent a failure from happening again. “We plan on upgrading this summer As well as purchasing spare parts so we have parts if it were to happen again,” stated Mr. Dougherty.
