28 August – 1 September. This week was a short week. Working in a normal manner of monitoring the servers and networks, I helped keep the IT department stay updated on current information. This included updating a schedule that is made to ensure that redundancy happens across all platforms. Improvements and updates happen consistently across the network, and sometimes when one of the systems doesn’t completely update in time or fails, it affects other systems across the network.

Along with these schedule updates, I helped balance servers that are used for remote login purposes, which is very important when a hurricane comes into an area where we have a law office. The lawyers can continue to work, worldwide, and stay within the network to keep working, no matter where they move or escape to. This is very important for cases that go worldwide and affect law worldwide, which ReedSmith is involved in.

Also, on Tuesday, I had to deal with an UPS issue with one of our new offices. The UPS that each office deals with is at a very large scale. The office power had gone down and the UPS only ran for a short time. After first investigating, we had thought that the batteries were bad, but instead during the initial setup, the company that installed them didn’t update the software. This caused the hardware to report that it was there, but not to help fail over when the power had gone out. After proving to the company that it was a fault of the equipment, then the software configuration, within 20 minutes we were able to see a longer power draw off the battery banks. This caused a difference of initially ten minutes, then moving to an hour. Our systems report occasionally, so when we find out problems such as this, it’s too late to react and get teams on the ground to fix problems. This caused some major problems for that office, and I felt that I had finally given a helping hand within the company.