Fridays 6:00 pm - Saturdays 6:00 am
Football Season: Email, network and Internet - Fridays 10:00 pm - Saturdays 6:00 am
We have 450 computer servers at SBISD serving 40,000 users (35,500
students plus 4,500 staff). Our wired and wireless data network connects
these servers to our computers – desktops, laptops, tablets,
smartphones, etc. The data network makes it possible to access several
hundred different programs we collectively use across the district. The
network provides access to the Internet and provides content filtering
(for our kids) and firewall protection (for viruses and malicious
hacking).
To maintain this extensive infrastructure takes time and effort.
Computer software goes through periodic updates to fix problems,
introduce new features and stay current. Updating takes time and while
the update is taking place, the computer or software is not available
for use. I’m sure you’ve experienced this with your smartphone. With
this many servers and programs something is always being updated – to
fix problems, to apply security patches, to upgrade to a new version.
Instead of scheduling each upgrade individually, we accumulate all the
updates for the week and do them all on Friday evenings. That’s the time
most of us are taking a breather from work. This is our “maintenance
window”. It is from 6:00 PM Friday to 6:00 AM Saturday. During this
weekly Friday “maintenance window” which system goes down depends on
what maintenance we are doing that week. If we are upgrading a major
network component, everything will go down. If we are upgrading one
application, just that application will go down. Please do remember the
program you are trying to access may be down Friday evening. You will
not see a warning. If it is being updated, it will just go down
abruptly.
By instituting the concept of a “maintenance window”, updates become a
routine thing. We don’t have to “schedule” each upgrade with all the
affected users. And, you don’t see a bunch of emails about various
systems going down at various times for maintenance.
To summarize, any computer system may go down on any Friday after 6:00
PM without warning. (During football season, we postpone email, network
and Internet upgrades to after 10:00 PM.)
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