This week I spent time in two interesting yet different areas of IT. One being BU’s Help Desk In Holcomb and BU’s server/data room in The Pharmacy Building.

The Help Desk is the go to place for computer/electronic issues. The department doesn’t get much business during the summer due to the volume of students being tremendously less than during the school year. The only issue of the day was the campus being blacklisted.

Being blacklisted, specifically for email means that your entire domain (e.g. @butler.edu) has been marked as spam. This means that everyone you send an email to, the email will be sent to their spam folder or not received at all. This issue came out when one student on campus caught a virus which caused her to send spam to all of her contacts. Contacts who replied to the email also caught the virus. About 8 students were affected in total.

Around 11am the department gets a call, the head coach of the women’s basketball team is having problems with her MacBook. Time to take a trip to Hinkle Fieldhouse, or as the guys at the help desk say, a “Gator Run”. Which involves zipping across campus in a 4 wheel drive utility vehicle capable of at most 25mph. When we arrived Coach Couture was having issues with her internet connection. When loading web pages her MacBook would freeze. We were perplexed why this was happening but upon further inspection she was connected to both Ethernet and Wifi with hopes of it “being faster” which is a big no-no. 

Friday I took a tour of the Server room in the basement of the pharmacy building. While servers and networking aren’t necessarily my forte, my tour guide was nice and explained things slowly with a minimal amount of jargon. The server room is unlike any other, it actually has an artistic flair, which in IT we seem to get away from. The walls are off white with a firebrick red accent wall and the floor slightly cream colored with a bamboo feel. The design carries from the conference/strategy room to even the back room that houses the circuit breakers.

It was an interesting experience I can say, It opened my eyes up to new things while expanding on things I already knew.