Download This morning one of our programmers, Zundra Daniel went up to

This morning one of our programmers, Zundra Daniel went up to Chattahoochee Tech to
observe the student taking the redesigned pretest application as an observer and technical
support if needed. While at the testing site Zundra observed several technical problems
while the students were taking their pre assessment quiz. Among those problems
observed were:
 "Page not found" errors
 Erratic display of question numbers
 Repeated questions
Zundra noted to Jimmy and Curt that it was clear to him that the most frequent error that
occurred which was the “Page Not Found” error was caused by network connection in the
room. However, concerning the other less frequent problems such as repeated questions,
and skipping questions it was not immediately obvious to Zundra what were causing
these additional problems at the time.
Zundra later found out that Dr. Jarrett observed a different class taking the exact same
quiz at approximately the same time and didn’t have any problem with the test. This
anomaly has caused us to draw some conclusions about the nature of the problems and
how to resolve them.
First off, the problem with the inexpensive wireless routers has been discussed on many
occasions. These discussions lead Curt, the DFCS IT technician on site and Jimmy to
hard wire each computer with hubs to try and eliminate the overloaded router issue.
However, this attempted solution actually caused more harm than good since network
hubs are notoriously bad at the task of managing network traffic and always leads to
what’s called packet collision in overloaded networks constructed with Hubs.
We believe the problems at Chattahoochee were caused by packet collision and an
unstable network environment. The TCP/IP protocol, which drives the Internet, transfers
data by chopping the data into little units called packets and then transfers the packets
individually. Under certain network configurations, the sheer amount of network traffic
causes packets to "collide," corrupting the data or causing the packet to be lost.
Hubs accept packets from routers and broadcast the packet to each and every computer
attached to the hub, regardless of whether that packet was meant for that computer or not.
This mass replication of packets leads to extremely high levels of network traffic and
causes severe packet collision problems. This does not occur on most wired networks
because most networks use switches or routers (wired not wireless) instead of hubs.
Switches and routers are "intelligent" and know which computer an individual packet is
intended for and only send the packet to that computer instead of each computer
connected to it. This greatly reduces the network traffic and thusly greatly reduces packet
collision.
In summary our system performs as it should under good network conditions. However,
any application would have problems in such an unstable networking environment ours
did. The flawless execution of the application as observed by Dr. Jarrett leads us to only
one logical conclusion. The only solution to this very frustrating problem is to alter the
network configurations to prevent large-scale packet collision. We recommend that in
order to prevent further large scale problems such as the one at Chattahoochee Tech this
morning that all training sites are upgraded to a routed and switched wired network in
order to perform as designed.