Pat McGowan

Weekly Log

March 11 - 17, 2007

Discussed a few web content filtering options with the Chief Security Officer at CONEXIS Benefits Administrators in Irving, Texas
Found that most options that corporations use are most likely out of the range of The Montessori Academy, unless educational discounts can be found

Tuesday March 20, 2007

Discussed needs for web filtering with Mrs. Kolata
Kevin and I believe she is interested in a way of doing content filtering that is within the budget of the school
Researched Surfcontrol and other web content filtering options
Began to install a demo version of Surfcontrol on computer #3 (Mrs. Kolata wants the server to be left alone for now)
Completed installation of demo version of Surfcontrol. I am going to do some testing on my extra computer
Set Windows updates to run on computer 3. They were running as I left.

Tuesday March 27, 2007

Looked at wireless router
I have narrowed the problem down to one of two things:
- A faulty router
- The router not being registered as a gateway in the network controller database
I will be doing testing of the wireless router from my room to see which case it is.
- If it is a faulty router, we should be able to replace it and get wireless up and running
- If the router's MAC address needs to be registered as a gateway, we will have to discuss the next steps with Mrs. Kolata

Tuesday April 10, 2007

Worked with the router one more time.
- Determined that the router was most likely a faulty router.
  - It seemed to work sometimes, but 5 minutes later it would not work
  - It was not reliable at all
- Decided to stop working with the router because it was a lost cause
Worked more with the DHCP service on their Windows 2000 server.
Tried to familiarize myself with how it works, in case we decided to try another router

Tuesday April 17, 2007

Began working with the Linksys router
Had discussions with their contracted IT guy
- We were both concerned that the router would serve as a DHCP server for network
Obtained a connection and the ability to broadcast wirelessly
- This was tested on my laptop
We plan on doing some testing next week

Tuesday April 24, 2007

Made a last ditch effort to implement the wireless
- Our suspicions came true, the router acts as a second DHCP server
  - This is bad because we have it configured with a different range of IP addresses
    - Namely 192.168.2.xxx, rather than the 192.168.1.xxx that the rest of the "wired" network is on
  - We tried to change setting to turn DHCP server capabilities off, but this doesn't allow users to connect via wireless.
We tried once more to change settings on the router, but once again we had no success at all
We decided that research over the summer and coming back ready to implement it next semester would be the best option