Server Upgrades
We are in the stone age of IT, and I have to be very wise in choosing which pieces of our network to upgrade/renovate first. We have made some strides in getting rid of bad NICs and ancient workstations, but now we’re facing some real issues.
You see, IT is not the church’s primary focus. In fact, no matter how much money is allocated to the IT budget, most in the church say it’s too much. So, it has not been a priority to get the network set up correctly. (I’ll show you some pictures of our cabling soon). We don’t have good switches, wireless access points, or in many cases computers. Further, we are running only one server for the entire network. Granted, we’re only up to about 60 nodes altogether.
The server is a workhorse. It’s got two dual core processors, but only a measly 1 GB of RAM. Well, tomorrow I’m beefing it up. We’re upgrading to 4 gigs of RAM and adding a second NIC. My hope is that it will dramatically increase our network performance, which is unbelieveably slow at peak hours.
We’re running Shelby (currently) as our ChMS, and it is the main place we notice problems. It takes up to 10 seconds just to get into the membership module at peak hours. Sunday, in the middle of check-in, every workstation essentially locked-up. So, tomorrow we’ll add RAM. Next month, I’m rewiring the whole building.
