Tech Talk

I hate to think I have good ideas, but this one might be worth exploring. Yesterday was a major network outage in our lab. There was some upgrade going on in the computing facilities so the networks kinda went for a toss. This is not a big issue in research facilities because at very few instances can such outages lead to larger problems. Almost nothing ever happens in a day or two. Ok, the MTechs/BTechs are different, but they have classes. So no network is not something that’d affect them.

I forgot that I was idle because of no network and went to the library to renew my long due books. Like a fool, I was carrying five books only to find out that the network at the library ain’t working and they cannot transact. Yeah, perils of a networked infra-structure. But there is a second point to this. Could the library have continued without stopping work? If not fresh issues, could they have at least handled renewals and returns, new memberships et al?

At first thought, no. But with a slight improvement in infrastructure: yes. All the machines are latest with very good hard drive capacities. If the library software was capable of caching certain details and work offline, library is independent of the network. And library was not alone.

You get the idea? I knew of a team that was interested in these lines. But they split. Ok, I come from there too. But the goal there was slightly different from this. Of course, this is not for a toss. I still need to verify with them that they are over with this. Again, I have done no research whatsoever to see what products already exist in this space.