 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. That's what we call it. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The terminology is up for debate in the online world. But whatever you want to call us, we are here live. Every Wednesday morning online at 10 a.m. Central Time. We do record the show, however, so if you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We record the show every week and then post it onto our website. And I will show you where that is at the end of today's show, so you can see all our recordings. So you can always go there later. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live. Presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, interviews. Basically, anything library-related that is really our only criteria is something to do with libraries. Something libraries are doing, a little out of the box they might be doing, something that may be of use to libraries and librarians, and all types of libraries, too. We are not your genre agnostic, public libraries, academic, anything. We all have anything on the show. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations here for things that are kind of, you know, Nebraska-centric. But we do bring in guest speakers on a regular basis as well. And that is what we have this morning. On the line with us is Chris Brown, who is, as you see right there on the side, he's Assistant Library Director at Pella Public Library, which is just next door to us in Iowa. Good morning, Chris. Good morning. And I actually, last month, attended the Iowa Library Association's annual conference, which was the week before our own annual conference here in Nebraska. It was a crazy one. And I attended Chris's presentation on this, Computer Networking for Librarians. I really, well, I wouldn't know if I enjoyed it because it's computers. But it was a good, I thought it was a really good session, good for, as it says if you looked at the description, and you had said, Chris, good for beginners, good for those of us who it's not our main job. Yes, absolutely. So I invited them to come on the show and share this with everyone beyond just the Iowa Library Association conference. So I'm just going to hand it over to you to take it away and tell us everything we need to know about computer networking. All right, thank you very much, Chris. No problem. No, not at all. Thank you very much. As she said, my name is Chris Brown. I'm currently employed as the Assistant Library Director at the Pella Public Library in Pella, Iowa. And as a lot of you well know, having director or associate somewhere in your title doesn't necessarily negate having to work on the library computers. If anything, it's going to make you perhaps more likely to end up with those responsibilities. So that's kind of what we're focusing on today. We're giving you some basics in computer networking so you'll know how to handle some of these tasks. So very quickly to explain the acronym behind my name, it's maybe a little bit different than the degree you're typically used to seeing. My official degree is a Master of Arts in Information Science and Learning Technologies with an emphasis in library science. The American Library Association considers it an accredited library science degree. So it all comes out in the wash. But the reason that I chose this particular course of study was because I was interested in how technology specifically was interacting with the everyday information needs of patrons and staff in a public library setting. When I started my career, I quickly realized that one of the most common things I was seeing over and over was that library staff due to budget restraints or other issues were becoming the de facto managers of their own IT systems. And usually that was without any sort of formal training. And so by de facto what I meant was we were googling the problem and we were praying for a solution. And so that's kind of why I developed this particular lecture and I kind of turned it into a book, which we'll talk about at the end of the session. But the reason I developed this is because we're kind of looking at how to get this training and how to get this information if you may not have any formal training in computer networking or computer maintenance or any of those sorts of things. So computer networking is a prime example of a need-to-know topic that you may not even know that you need to know. The computer network is one of a series of those mysterious devices that you have. They might be locked in a closet or tucked away in the basement that are at the heart of how all of your library computers interact with one another. Without a computer network, you can't share a printer, you can't share files, you can't access the internet. And most importantly, perhaps you can't access your integrated library system, your ILS. So a computer network is vitally important to how your library functions. Just a little bit more about me. A high school speech and debate coach told me once that I should establish my credentials before I start a presentation. But you probably are looking at these and saying, well, these are kind of anti-credentials. And that's true, but hear me out here. I want to point out that I'm coming from the same place that you guys are. I'm not a computer science major. I'm not a world-famous expert in this particular field. I'm just a guy who has studied this, researched how this is done, and I'm getting by day-to-day in my public library. So that's where I'm coming from. Hopefully I'm coming from the same place that you are. You know, my heart and my love is libraries. So I want this to go well for everybody, and hopefully today we're going to be able to discuss that and talk about some tips and some things that you can use to manage your computer network a little bit better. So the first question we have to ask ourselves when we're starting to look at this topic is, why should we bother knowing about information technology in general? Why should we bother knowing about IT? There's plenty of companies out there. There's one in every town, and there's companies that cover county-wide, statewide, different things like that. They purport to be able to, for a contracted fee, be able to manage all of the information technology in your library. No problem. We can do that. But the problem is that why do we need to know about this stuff if they can manage it? Well, there's a couple reasons. First of all, if you're talking to these people, you're going to need to be able to speak a little bit of the language, to speak a little bit of the lingo. If they start talking about a network router, you're going to want to have at least a vague idea of what it is that they're talking about so you can understand what they're saying and also be able to talk back to them and say, okay, these are our needs. This is what we think we need, and this is the approach that we would like to take with this. So it's vitally important when you're talking to your IT vendor that you do know a little bit of information about this. The second thing is, and perhaps even more important than the first, like all emergencies in the library, you need to know what to do in the event of a network emergency. Most of us hopefully have plans for what to do in a fire in the library. Obviously, you'd get out of the building, what to do in a flood. You'd call for water mitigation, things like that. In a tornado, you'd shelter in place. So why do we leave out information technology? Why is it that when we talk about emergencies, we tend to leave out things like a network emergency? If our ILS goes down and we can't provide any services to patrons, it seems to me that that would constitute an emergency that we would need to plan for. So you do need to know something about how the IT in your building works for that purpose. Third and finally, and this is just Murphy's Law. I think we're all familiar with it, but if anybody's not familiar with Murphy's Law, basically it states roughly that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And the application here is, of course, if you have a third party IT person that services your computers and services your network, the one time you have an emergency and you call them and you need them to be on site, he or she will not be there for some reason. So they'll either be at the other end of the county or at the other end of the state, or they'll be completely unavailable for some reason. So in that event, you'll have to try to mitigate the crisis yourself, at least until they can get on site and help you out with it. So it's important that you know something about how the information technology in your library works. So we've talked about why knowing about information technology, but why specifically should you know about your computer network? Well, first it's very important to know how everything is tied together. In order to be able to document your network, you have to have at least a basic understanding of how it functions and how the components function. And of course, like all things in the library, you also want to be able to plan for the future. You have to be able to understand what this equipment does so you can think about, okay, are we going to need an upgrade to this equipment? Are we going to run out of room on our network rack for the number of computers that we need to connect? And we'll get into that in a little bit, but it's vitally important for things like planning for the future. You also want to be able to describe your computer network over the phone. If you're talking, for example, to your IT service person who, again, according to Murphy's Law, is going to be on the wrong end of the county when you're having a problem, you want to be able to describe some of the things that are going on in some detail. So you want to have a basic vocabulary and an understanding of how these things work within the network. The third reason you want to know about your network is so you can potentially diagnose an equipment failure. So in the event that something goes wrong, it's conceivable, if you do a little bit of study and a little bit of documentation, it's conceivable that you will be able to go down into the network room and actually be able to diagnose that problem yourself and perhaps even correct that problem without a service call. And of course, as we all know, the fewer service calls we have, the more money that the library saves as a whole. So if there's something you can diagnose, it would be worth it to learn a little bit about how it works, so perhaps you can actually maybe even fix it yourself. So I want to talk real quick. Now that we've talked about why you need to know these things, I want to give you an example from my own recent history here at the Pella Public Library. In February of 2013, and I don't remember the exact date, but I was woken up in the middle of the night at my house by several close lightning strikes, but since they didn't hit my house, I didn't think too much of it and I went back to bed. The next morning I went into work and the first inclination I had that something was wrong was when the director stuck her head out of the door and said, you know, Chris, we don't have any access to our network drives. And I said, no problem, that's a simple file sharing issue. I'll go downstairs, I'll restart the server and we'll be back online in about five minutes without any problem at all. So I went downstairs to the network room and I flipped on the light and my eyes got about as big as dinner plates. That's when I knew we had a serious problem. I was looking at the network rack and I could tell, again because I had documented this in advance, I could tell that the lights that were showing on the network rack, the status indicator lights were not correct at all. I had one piece of equipment that had all of the lights on and no activity. I had another piece of equipment with no lights on whatsoever that should have had lots of lights on it. Just generally, things were obviously not working the way they were supposed to and it became clear within a short amount of time that one of those lightning strikes had actually struck the public library and caused damage to some of our equipment. So, and in addition to having problems with the network equipment, we discovered that when the building was struck and the network equipment took that lightning strike, the electricity traveled backwards through the data cables up through to some of our computers. So in addition to having a network problem, we lost two computers and a printer as well as several network cards. So we did have quite an issue on our hands there. Again, I want to point out that we had documented the network in advance of this issue, so we were able to go to our papers and say, okay, this is how the network is constructed. These are the things that should be operating and then we were able to start triaging and say, okay, obviously these things aren't operating. Is there any way that we can round around them until we can get our IT service person there? And like I said, example from reality, when I called the IT service person, they were on the other end of the county and it was going to take them some time to get there. Even though we were opening soon, I was going to have to figure out a way to get some of our core services, our front desk computers, to come back online. So being able to reroute this stuff in a matter of about four hours, I would say that we were able to come back online for the most part. We did have a few backroom computers that weren't working, but we had the front desk computers back up, we had the internet working again, and we had these things going. And I estimate that if I waited on my IT service person to start working on that, it would have been at least a day or more before we had come back online. So now that we've talked about why we need to look at our network, let's go ahead and dig right into the five major components to make up the basic small business network, which is going to be the type of network that most small and some mid-sized public libraries use. It's what's called a small business network. It's meant for moderate amounts of day-to-day traffic, but obviously it's not an enterprise network like Microsoft or something like that. The five major components that are going to make up your network, and there may be others, but these are the core components that you're probably going to have in your system. The first one is the internet service provider modem. The second one is a network router. The third one is a firewall. The fourth one is a network switch. And the fifth one is actually the cables that connect everything together. They're called ethernet cables that connect all of these devices together. And we're going to dig into each of these in just a minute, so don't panic if you're a little confused about the terminology on the list, because we're going to dig right into this. So the first one that I want to talk about is the internet service provider modem. There's a couple of different ways. When you're looking at your network, there's a couple of different ways to analyze it. When you're looking at the network, you can either work from the top down, which means you start at your incoming internet connection and work your way down the chain, figuring out how stuff is connected. You work your way down the chain until you get to the individual computers in your building, or there's the bottom-up approach. You start with the individual computers in your building, and then you look at how everything is connected all the way back up to the internet cable. I prefer to start with the top-down approach. So the first device that we're going to talk about is the one that's connected directly to our incoming internet connection, and that's your internet service provider or ISP modem. The internet service provider modem is a device that is connected to whatever your incoming internet connection is. So depending on the type of connection you have, you might have cable internet, in which case you'd have something that looks like a TV cable coming into your network, or you might have DSL, which isn't exactly the same as dial-up, but it would look like a traditional telephone line coming in from the service provider to your network. There's lots of different cables that could come into this, but basically you need to know that this is the end that's going to connect to the internet service provider. And in terms of what you need to know about this box, it's actually quite simple. As long as you know which lights are supposed to be lit up on the front, which we'll talk about a little later how to document that, there's only two cables that go into this device. The first one is the cable from the internet service provider. So they tell what looks like a TV cable would screw into the back, and then the other is going to be the cord that comes out and goes to your network. So in terms of connectivity it's really quite simple, and the nice thing about this is the internet service provider should take care of all the configuration on this device. You won't have to do any configuration at all, as long as it's connected and powered on and in a normal state, then you're good to go and it should be able to provide internet service to your network. These are, you know, the modem is based on the traditional dial-up modem, but it is a little bit, obviously it doesn't dial into anything anymore. The traditional dial-up modem actually made audible sounds in order to translate the data through a traditional phone line. But any more, this is all done through bits and not through audio sounds. But the idea is still there that the modem is what allows your network to speak the language of the internet service provider's network. So in the close, I was thinking about metaphors last night that I could use for this. The closest metaphor that I've got, if anybody remembers the old Star Trek television series, if you remember Lieutenant Uhura, she would have the, what might be called the universal translator that she always had clipped to one ear that allowed her to speak other languages. That's basically what the internet service provider modem allows your network to do. It allows it to speak another language so it can connect to the internet service provider's network. So this next device is known as a router, and it is even more important than the internet service provider modem. Without the internet service provider modem, your network doesn't have internet, but you can still share files between computers and different things like that. Without a network router, you really don't have a network because this device is what creates the logical structure of your network. And I'll explain all that in just a minute so again, don't panic, we'll get into this. But what a network router does is, well it does exactly what the name implies. It actually routes the data on your network and tells the data traffic where it should go. So when data comes in from the internet, it directs the traffic to the correct area of your network so it can be delivered to the computers, and vice versa when your computer sends information back out to the internet, it directs that traffic out to where it needs to go. So again, with a metaphor, here's how you should think of a network router. So you're getting a back room tour of your local post office. And a semi truck full of mail backs up to the loading dock of the post office and it unloads. Now you've got carts of mail all over your mail room that need to be sorted, and that's what a network router does. It routes the data to the appropriate location by sorting it out based on destination and some other criteria. I want to make an important note here that the network router does not deliver the data. It simply sorts the data so that it can be delivered efficiently. The router sorts all that data so that the local postman, which we'll talk about here in just a minute, can actually deliver the data to where it's supposed to go. And likewise when you send mail from your house, or in this case send it from your computer, it packages that data up and sends it back out so it can be put on the semi truck and taken away. We've talked a little bit about what the router does, but it's because of the way the router functions. It's worth noting that there are a couple of functions on the router that you could find come in kind of handy depending on your situation in your particular library. So the first one is bandwidth management. And by that I mean it depends on the size of your internet connection, but a lot of us may have run into this scenario where if you've got a bunch of public users on your network and most of us provide public computers, if you've got somebody on your public computer that's using a bunch of your bandwidth, say they're streaming videos or they're playing online games or something like that, you may find that you lose the ability to function effectively on your staff computers at the front desk because that bandwidth is being eaten by those other users. And so a network router, if you divide your network into two separate networks, a public and a staff side and a third party IT vendor can help you get started with this, a router has the ability to say, okay, for the public side of this network, we're only going to allow a certain amount of bandwidth into this side. So say you've got a 20 megabit connection, megabit per second connection. If you say, I only allow, I kept the public network at 15 megabits per second, that means that no matter how much data that public network uses, you'll still always have 5 megabits per second available for the staff side so the staff will never feel the crunch of running out of bandwidth. So that is one service that a network router can provide, which is bandwidth management. A second service that a network router can provide is what are called failover services. Say, let's take a hypothetical situation. You have a fast cable internet connection in your library and you also have a slower backup DSL internet connection. The router, if you can plug both of those connections into the router and the router can automatically decide that, hey, if for some reason you lose the primary cable connection, it will automatically failover to the low-speed DSL connection. So you won't lose internet access, your internet speed might be reduced but it will automatically connect to that backup internet connection and your network won't even know the difference. And then when that high-speed connection comes back online, the process is reversed. The router detects that the high-speed connection is back online and automatically switches back over to that connection. The final note I want to make about routers before we move on is that a lot of times, especially if you've got a Cisco brand device but some other ones as well, a lot of times the network router and the next device we're going to talk about, which is the firewall are actually in the same physical package. So you might just have one box that serves both as a router and as a firewall. The functionality for both devices is there but they may be integrated into one package as opposed to having two separate boxes which is the more traditional way you see things done. So the next device we're going to talk about here is the network firewall and it is the single most important security device on your network. Technically, your network could function without this device but I absolutely do not recommend doing that. This is the security device for your network. This makes sure the bad data stays out. It's the gatekeeper to your network. The firewall is the big burly dude that stands at the entrance to the club and says, hey, you can't come in here, you're not on the list. This is the one that's going to keep all the bad data off of your network and take it from me having looked into this a little bit. There's a lot of bad data coming in from the internet. If you sit with somebody, say your third party technician and you monitor the data coming in from a firewall that hits to a network firewall, if you monitor that data coming in, you're going to be amazed just in the short amount of time at how much data is actually rejected from that firewall. How many times a computer that the firewall doesn't know, your network doesn't know, a computer somewhere across the world just seemingly at random tries to connect to a service on your network. It's very, very important to have this firewall in place so that those types of connections, those types of data entries and data breaches can be rejected as opposed to going directly onto your network. Keeping with our post office metaphor here, the network firewall is going to be the U.S. postal inspector who's going to walk around the back room and it's using very specific technology to actually look inside the mail, to actually look at the data inside the mail to determine if the content is potentially harmful in some way. If the content is harmful, the data is simply discarded, but if the firewall thinks that the content that's coming in is okay, then it will actually let it through to your local network. I want to reiterate again with this, do not risk running your network without a hardware firewall of some sort. I have run into a couple of networks where that is the case, fortunately not recently, but I have run into a couple of networks that run without a hardware firewall and I do not recommend that. I want to talk for a second about the difference between this and your typical software firewall. The most common one is what we call Windows firewall, which is actually built into newer version of Windows. Windows firewall is great for stopping data that shouldn't be there from coming on to a local computer, but the problem is if you don't have a hardware firewall at the head of your network, then that data is already on your network, just looking for a vulnerability and looking for an opening. I'm here to tell you that eventually it's going to find one because while you may think that your computers are protected with Windows firewall and they may be, think of some of the other things on your network that are vulnerable that don't have firewalls. The most common one I can think of is your local printer. Does your printer have any sort of security? Have you even changed the default password for the web interface to your printer? Did you know there was a web interface to your printer? Did you know it was vulnerable to these kinds of attacks? That's why it's so important to have a firewall at the head end of your network. So this rogue data doesn't get onto your network and create troubles. One other point I want to make with the firewall is that it also has some hidden features that you might find interesting and these are things that you should definitely look into with your IT service provider if this is a scenario that sounds like you. If you're having trouble with managing bandwidth and you have a specific service that's causing a problem, say for example you have a lot of kids that are coming into the library and using BitTorrent, which is a peer-to-peer file sharing service and they're eating all your bandwidth up. Since the firewall looks at the data that's coming in, the firewall is able to tell, at least to some degree, it's able to recognize peer-to-peer data as opposed to other data that might be coming in. And in some cases it's able to isolate that data and discard it so it can actually disallow specific services like peer-to-peer file sharing while keeping your normal, otherwise your normal internet running just the way it was. It's able to discard some of those specific services and disallow them from happening on the network. So if you are having trouble with a specific service and bandwidth, that is something definitely that you should look into perhaps with a third-party IT service person. So we've talked about your data coming from the internet service provider modem. It's coming from the router, it's being sorted at the router, and it's passed through the security gates in your firewall. It's actually now on your mostly internal network. The final device that's going to be in this chain before it goes out to the individual computer is what's known as a network switch. And as I pointed out, maybe obvious, not actually a light switch. When we're talking about a network switch, we're talking about something called packet switching, which is a way of sending out data from one point to another. Now you'll remember that I told you that the router sorts the data, but it does not actually deliver the data. What you're looking at here, the network switch, that's the actual local postman that's going to deliver the data. The network switch knows where every computer that's connected to it is located, and it delivers the data to that specific location. So let's say you have 10 computers connected to one of these switches. When those computers are turned on, the switch will memorize which computer is attached to which physical port on the front of the switch, and you can see there in the image that there are quite a few physical ports on the front of that particular switch. It memorizes which computer in your building is connected to each of those ports. The computers do actually have addresses. We won't get into that today, but each computer does have a specific address. So that's what the switch memorizes when the computer comes on is that computer's address. Once those addresses are memorized, then the switch is just like the local postman. When data comes through, which has been marked as bound for a specific computer, the switch is able to know exactly what port that computer is connected to and immediately send the data through to that computer. So it is able to actually deliver that data to all the individual houses on a particular post route. This third point here, I was talking about data collisions and things like that. Years ago was sort of a historical note. Before network switches were common, what you had was something called network hubs, and a network hub is basically a network repeater. What would happen is a packet of data would come in from the router, and it would immediately be broadcast to all of the ports on the network hub, which looked like a switch. So all the computers would receive all of the data coming in from the router, which meant basically it would be as though a postman had a letter to deliver, and the postman made 25 copies of the letter and gave them to all 25 houses on his route. Now, one of the houses would be the correct house, the house the letter was intended for, but the other 24 houses would, the letter would just be rejected. It would be returned to sender. And electronically speaking, that made things very, very slow and inefficient. So it's a great thing now that we have switches which actually memorize which computer is connected to which port and are able to send that data directly out. I do also want to make the note here that switches can be uplinked, and basically that's a fancy word to say, uplinking has a variety of meanings, but in this case what it means is if you run out of ports, say you've got one of these network switches here and you fill up all the ports, you connect all the computers and printers that you can and you no longer have any space on that switch. What you can do is you can purchase another switch, connect them with an ethernet cable, and that will give you more ports. The switches will talk, if you connect them together with an ethernet cable, the switches will talk as though they were one unit. And generally that's an automatic function. It used to be that you had to do some hardware settings and some changes, but any more uplinking is an automatic function that is just part of how the switch operates. So it's nice that these switches can be connected together so that they can talk together so that when you do need to add more ports, more space on your network, more computer connections, you can just add another switch into the mixture. And last but not least, we've talked about the postal delivery service from the top down to the bottom of the network, and the very last thing that I want to talk about are the roads that make it all happen. This is one of the most overlooked components of a network. If you have all of these great network devices that do all these complicated functions, they don't do much good unless the data can get from point A to point B. And that's what ethernet cables do. They allow you, in a modular sense, they allow you to connect one device to another and allow you to connect all these devices to the computers that are located throughout your building. So just a little bit about ethernet cables, and you probably had some experience with them. They look like phone cables, but they are wider than phone cables, so the two types are not interchangeable, but they are based on what's called the RJ standard. So they look like phone cables. They have that square plug and the little plastic clip at the top, which is a good thing because it means that simply it's plug-and-play. You plug it in, it snaps into place. When you're ready to unplug it, you just pinch down on that little tab, pull out, and there's no crimping, rewiring, anything like that. It just is a plug-and-play device. So it's really good for being able to make quick changes to your network. One thing I do want to point out is that there are different types of this cable. They call them categories of cable, which is why it's abbreviated to CAT is because these are categories of cable. The standard for a long time was category 5 ethernet cable, and that would run, now internally we're talking, it would run on your network at a speed of up to 100 megabits per second. That's the speed which you could share files from one computer to another, send a job to the printer, different things like that. Now the standard for new networks is to have it run at a gigabit per second or a thousand megabits per second, but the old CAT 5 cable does not support that speed. In order to get those speeds successfully, your entire network, internally, your entire network needs to be either CAT 5e or category 6 cable. So you can certainly think about that if you feel like your file sharing on your internal network is slow. A lot of times you're going to be fine with 100 megabits per second, but do know that the new standard now is CAT 5e or CAT 6. And in order to get that speed, all the cables on your network have to be that higher category of cable. Say you replace all the cables on your network panel with CAT 5e, well that's great, but if the wires running through your walls to the individual computers are still the old CAT 5, you're not going to get that higher speed. And the last thing I want to mention here is that when Ethernet cables are used, generally they're plugged into a patch panel that's connected to other Ethernet cables throughout the building. And we'll talk about a patch panel here in just a second, but that's usually where they terminate. So that is it in terms of the major components of your library network. You've been top to bottom through what you need to connect to basic library network. Now again, your library network may have other devices that it uses, obviously file servers, network attached storage, different devices like that that we didn't cover here, but what we covered just covered the primary components that you would need. And I want to take one final example here. You've probably seen these. You can buy them off the shelf at Walmart. They are wireless routers. You probably use one in your home in order to get wireless internet from your modem. But if you think about how it actually works, this is actually a complete network in a box, which is why it's so popular. It contains a network router to sort the data from your network to the internet service provider's network. It contains a firewall of some sort to filter the incoming data. Now how effective that firewall is, you'd have to read the manual and determine that for the specific device. And it also contains a switch, both a physical place where you can plug in computers on the back of the device and also a wireless switch, which allows you to connect computers using radio signals, but the same idea applies. The system knows where each computer is and is able to send data directly to it. So this is a complete network in a box, so you get the concept of how this all fits together. So very quickly we're going to go through some other devices that you might have on your network that are not core to the network but are really nice to have. The first one's going to be an uninterruptible power supply, which is known as a UPS. This is a device that's quite a bit better than a power strip. The typical setup for someone who didn't know much about networks would be to have a power strip plugged into the wall and then all of the power cables from your network devices, your switches, your routers, whatever, plugged into the power strip. But the power strip only protects against large power surges. There are lots of instances where you will have electrical issues that you may not even notice visually. If you're looking at the lights or whatever, you may not even notice them visually, but they may be enough to cause a problem with your network equipment to make your network equipment either malfunction or to crash. And what an uninterruptible power supply does is it actually flattens that data out, or excuse me, flattens that power out so that... Go ahead. Oh, we do have a question. Actually, I think going back to the previous, the wireless. Oh, sure. Yeah, go ahead. And I just want to see if anyone does have any questions. Do type them in your question section about any of those, the main parts that entail your network. So I want you to distinguish between wireless, because wireless is a term that a lot of us know and use for various things, as opposed to distinguish between wireless, meaning Wi-Fi and wireless referring to a cell phone. Because this is different for potential. Sure, absolutely. So we'll take Wi-Fi first. Wi-Fi operates on a specific set of frequencies, and your user manual you're going to see this referred to as channels. And wireless is intended for a particular, which is Wi-Fi, is intended for a particular location. So it's intended for, say, a room in your library. We have a great room in our library, and wireless internet is available there. Wi-Fi internet is available there. But when we leave that area, it's not available. Now, when you're talking about wireless through a cell phone, you're talking about what's sometimes referred to as a 4G service or 3G service, and that's a data signal that actually piggybacks off of your cell phone signal and talks to the cell tower. So no matter where you are, it's going to talk to the cell towers, and you're going to get your internet data through there. So the easiest way to think of it is as kind of a, Wi-Fi is kind of a local building-based thing, and 4G is something that operates through your cell phone, and you're going to be able to take that with you anywhere. Now, one of the confusions arises because your cell phone can operate off of either 4G or it can also adopt a local Wi-Fi network if one is available to save your data package, to save you from having to use that costly data. That's what a lot of us, like for myself, we do at home. Whenever I'm at home, I connect into the Wi-Fi so that, like you said, I'm not using up the data that I've paid for. Exactly. Yeah, and you have to pay careful attention to the icons on your particular phone to figure out which service you're actually using at a particular time. But there's a lot of phones, like if you go to McDonald's, they'll automatically adopt that network and start using it. Did that kind of answer the question, I guess? I think so. Okay. There you go. Thank you. Okay. So kicking back over here to the uninterruptible power supply, we're talking about how it can filter electrical noise so that your equipment is more protected than it would be on a traditional power strip. And I also wanted to point out these can serve as battery backup units. So if the power does go completely out, your network at least will continue to operate for a time before it has to be shut off as well. Another consideration for your network is an actual network rack and a lot of you probably have this already, probably to some degree looks familiar. The network rack is the frame that we're looking at that goes around the network devices that you see here. It's that steel frame. That's what I'm talking about when I'm saying a network rack. And the only reason I mention this is because I was in a library years ago that did not have a network rack. All of their networking devices were on a card table stacked up one on top of the other. And considering the cost of those devices and considering the value of those devices to your organization, it's important that they are secure. So a network rack is simply a framework into which you can mount these various network devices. So they are held securely. They are spaced appropriately for heat flow. And they are properly grounded in the event of an unattentional static discharge. So you're wearing a cable net sweater, which I do not recommend. And working on your network equipment, the rack being properly grounded could potentially save you from a static-based problem. Network racks do come in a variety of different styles. Some are floor-mounted and stand on the floor. Some of them are mounted to a wall. Some of them are open-frame designs, which is like the one you see here where everything is just out and available. Some of them are locking cabinet designs. So if your network area has to be in an area that's potentially unsecure, I see this a lot in schools where they don't want the students messing with anything. They'll actually have it in a locking cabinet so it can only be accessed by authorized personnel. So if you don't have something like that, that is something I would definitely recommend looking into just for the physical security of your devices to make sure that they don't, for example, fall off the table. One other consideration for your network is a patch panel. And again, unfortunately, I don't have a picture of this, so I'm going to have to try to draw a picture here for you with words. But basically, you have computers all over your building connected to ports in the wall. So the port nearest to where you have a computer is where you plug the ethernet into. Now that port on the backside of it is connected to a very long ethernet cable that runs through your walls and to wherever your network area is. When that cable comes out of the wall in your network area, a patch panel is something that you use and what you do is you wire those cables that come out of the wall permanently into the back of that patch panel. Then the front of the patch panel just has a bunch of ports. It's not a data device. It doesn't do anything with the data. It's just a bunch of pass-through ethernet ports. And when you plug a cable into the front, it connects it to one of those long cables in the back that goes out to a particular computer. And the value of that is that you can use much shorter cables that are less likely to tangle in order to make those various connections on your network. If you don't have a patch panel, what you're stuck doing is trying to manipulate those very long cables that are coming out of the wall and plugging them into the appropriate places on your network switch and some other things. If you have a patch panel, you simply plug one end into a port on the patch panel that represents a particular computer in your building and then you plug the other end into your network switch using a much shorter cable. So we've talked about the network. We've talked about how it's put together. Is that everything? Absolutely not. There's much more to this than simply understanding the basics of how it works. You're also going to want to make sure that you document the network, both for your own, just so it's easier for you to understand and also so in the event of an emergency. You have an idea of how it works. A third-party person would have an idea of how it works. It's not completely in the dark when an emergency does occur. So the main theme that I'm going to hit over and over in the next remaining few minutes here is you want to document, document, and document your network some more. The first thing you ought to do, as you can see over here, I've got a picture of one. If you've got a dimo labeler, definitely grab one of those things as quick as you can once the session is over and you feel like you have some time to work on it. Grab a dimo labeler, crank it up to the biggest font it'll print, and you start printing out labels like Firewall, Router, Network Switch, and you start sticking those on the actual equipment. That way, if there's an issue, there's no ambiguity about what a particular box does or what it is. You will know exactly looking at it right away what that box does. Sometimes it's very obvious that the vendors are very helpful and they print the function of a particular device on the front of the device, so it will say Firewall, but sometimes they're not very helpful, and in that case, you need to make sure that your equipment is well-labeled so that anyone working on it has an idea of what that stuff is. The next thing you'll want to do, and we'll talk about specific documentation here in a minute, but you want to be sure that you post some stuff on the walls in your network area. So if somebody does have to go down there in an emergency and try to work on the network, they're going to be able to see that stuff right there and they're not going to have to go looking for it, have to go searching for it. But in addition to that, you should also keep the network documentation in your emergency binder, and hopefully most of you have an emergency binder that would be for like Fire, Flood, tornado, things like that. Keep your network emergency stuff in there as well. The documentation I want to go over really quickly is what's called a network map. And all the network map is a diagram of the connections that make up your, all the connections that make up your library network. So how all of your network equipment is connected to one another. So the idea here is that you would say you have a friendly coach that's going to loan you the use of this football field. You take all of your network equipment out to that football field, go out flat, and then you reconnect it so that you can see how that network equipment is connected. You go up to the club level, since you're a VIP, you go up to the club box, you look down on it, and that's the picture that you get with the network rack. You're able to see how all of those devices are connected together, as opposed to looking at it when it's on the network rack, which is sometimes when you're looking at something on the network rack, the devices aren't stacked in order from top to bottom. It's sometimes very difficult to see how one thing is connected to another. So in order to create a picture of how all of the devices are connected to one another, the program I recommend is a program called Network Notepad. There are both free and pay versions to this, depending on your particular situation. The address to get this program is www.networknotepad.com. And it is a very, a function-specific program. Basically, you start out with a white sheet of paper, just like you would in Microsoft Word, and what you do is you drag and drop icons that represent the various devices on your network onto this sheet of paper. And then the program allows you to draw lines between those icons that represent the Ethernet connections from one device to another. The program also allows you to label those devices, so you can say it's a firewall, you can say this is the serial number, this is the IP address of this particular device. So it is actually a very handy program for drawing up a network map. And to give you an idea here, this is a simple network map that I drew up. You can see that I have three PCs, a wireless access point and a laser printer, all connected to my network switch, which is then connected to my firewall and router, which is connected to my modem, which is then connected to my incoming Internet line. When you lay it out like this, it is very easy to see how everything is connected together, which is going to be important, especially if you have a problem where you need to reroute some of this stuff on the fly, like the lightning strike we talked about earlier in the presentation. You're going to need to be able to reroute that stuff, so you're going to need to know how it's connected together. I do want to tell you that in terms of mapping, there's no right way to map a network, so do whatever is going to work best for you. I tend to start with the Internet modem on the top of the sheet of paper and work my way down, but it's personal preference and it's entirely up to you. I would again recommend that you put at least one copy in your emergency binder and tape another copy on the wall next to your networking equipment, so that's available to whoever may come to diagnose your network in the event of an emergency. Okay, so the second piece of documentation that we're going to cover real quick is what's called a lights chart, and this is an important one, whether or not your equipment is in a normal state. You know, hopefully by now you understand that I don't expect everybody to be an IT guru. I'm not the world's greatest IT guru myself, but this is going to allow you to be able to read the lights on a particular piece of equipment in the same way that a network person would be able to do it. So the basic function behind this chart is when everything is working normally, what you do is you go down to your network room, you take each device and you say, okay, these are the lights on the device that are on currently. These are the lights that are off. What color are the lights that are on? What are those lights doing? Are they blinking? Are they strobing? Are they solid? You record all that information, and then in an emergency, in an emergency when you suspect that one of these isn't working, you go down, you take your lights chart, and you say, okay, I have documented how these lights are supposed to look. And if they don't match how you expect them to look, then you can expect that there might be a problem with one of those devices. And that's valuable information when you're talking to an IT service technician that might be going to help you out with this. So really quickly here, I did make up a lights chart. I just did this real quick with my home cable modem. I went down and I listed all the lights so I could see that the lights had little names that were printed on the modem. There was a power light, a DS light, a US light, an online light, and a link light. And then I made an observation about each one. I said that the power light, again, this is in a normal state, the power light was steady green, the DS light was steady blue, the US light was steady blue, the online light was steady blue, and the link light was flickering green. Now, if I'm having a problem with my internet at home and I look at the front of the modem and I look at this chart and I say, okay, the DS light is dark, and I know when this is working correctly it's supposed to be steady blue, I can then call the ISP with that information and say, okay, I think we've got some sort of a problem here. So you'll probably want one of these charts for each one of the devices that you have on your network rack. And one tip, I've been asked over and over how to deal with ISPs when the internet service provider claims that the problem is not on their end. And basically the only real advice I've got is don't take no for an answer, especially if you have a lights chart that tells you how it's supposed to look. If that doesn't match what you're seeing, say so, say, you know, I've already got this recorded, obviously this equipment is malfunctioning, you guys need to come out and take a look at this and try to take care of this. I think we've all, at one point or another, pretty much universally had to run around with an ISP and you've just got to keep saying, you know, the problem is on your end and I need you guys to come out and take a look at it. So definitely don't take no for an answer on it. So very quickly, I told you at the beginning that I have rolled this presentation and some other information that I have, some other technical knowledge that I have into a book that was just published in July by Libraries Unlimited. The title of the book is Crash Course in Technology Planning. It is available on Amazon.com and through Libraries Unlimited. So if you are interested in learning more about managing IT in a small library or mid-sized library setting, I would definitely recommend taking a look at that book. There is a preview available on Google Books if you want to kind of try before you buy there. But I, you know, what I tried to do was I did one of those things where I wrote the book that I wished that I'd had when I started my career. It wasn't available to tell me how to get going with this stuff and so that's the book that I turned over and it came out in July and it sort of tells you how to do those different things. So I guess I just want to, the last thing I want to tell you real quick is that you should definitely contact me if you have any questions or, you know, if you have a problem that you want to hash over or something. I love problem-solve. You know, I love to talk to people, get ideas about what's working for them, what's not working for them. So definitely do contact me. Again, email address is going to be cbrownatcityofpella.com and I encourage you to visit the website www.You'reItSoloIT.com and definitely contact me if you have any questions, anything you want to hash over because I would love to talk to you for sure. So I guess at this point, Christa, I'm going to go ahead and turn it back over to you and we will open it up for questions. Sure, yes, absolutely. Thank you very much, Chris. Yeah, if anybody does have any more questions, type them into your questions section on this webinar interface. I can pass them on as we did earlier or if you have a microphone, you can use your own microphone to ask your question as well. And for those of you who are pre-registered for today's show, you did get an email from me yesterday that I did send you the link to that website, the You're It Solo IT presentation. This PowerPoint is available on there ahead of time and it is linked from the session page for this episode and you'll have it also afterwards to refer to. So you have all those definitions and everything on there for you. So as I said, Chris, yeah, this is great. As it's about halfway through, I was realizing that I think the switch is part of it. I was like, this is the kind of thing that always scared me, I know. I mean, I've never worked as a solo library director or anything like that, but just knowing that there are these kind of things in libraries and that even the littlest library needs this. I mean, the smallest one-person library, if you're going to have computers with Internet, this is all the things you need. It's not nearly as scary as it seems. So much of it, especially with the switches, it knows what it needs to do. It's a lot of plug-and-play. Exactly. Exactly. It's like, yeah. That's what you've got to remember about it. It is an awful lot of plug-and-play and the other comment I want to make on that is that IT people especially, sometimes we're guilty of making things more complicated than they need to be. Yeah. We tend to like big words and things like that and really, you know, when you boil it down, these are the essential functions and this is how it works. So it really isn't as scary as it first appears. And I know all IT people and people who do, unlike you and we have the computer degrees, they do know more about what's going on inside these things and what could be for a whole bigger network and I think you can have it. And we do as librarians as well, use our own jargon and whatnot. They think a little too big for it. Well, it's got all this stuff and you just, don't worry about it, I'll take care of it. Well, if you can just simplify it, it's not... Exactly. I don't need to know what's going on inside that switch in such detail. I just need to know it does this to that, to that once I plug everything in together. Exactly. Exactly. Now for a lot of the diagram thing, that network website and the light thing, I know sometimes what I've done for personal things, taking pictures or video of how things are connected. Absolutely. That's something that would be useful as well. That's a great idea. Going along with your disaster handbook, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. That would be very useful from not only the perspective of being able to address it when there's a problem, but also from an insurance perspective. That may be something that your insurance person would like to have as a video of what devices you actually have and how they're connected. Yeah, I thought about it when you were talking about the lights and then I realized, well, a picture is not going to show as well what's flickering, what's going, blinking on and off, but a video. Right. Sure, a video of what everything looks like. So you can see that one's blinking, that one's steady. Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. Now, for a lot of these things, I know some many libraries are set up for this already, but you were talking about the different Ethernet cables that we now have beyond the Cat5. Is there a big cost difference in that kind of thing? Cat5e is getting to be the standard, so the cost between the old Cat5 is getting kind of hard to find. But the cost difference between the Cat5 and the Cat5e is not negligible. It's upgrading. Yeah. The Cat6 is a premium cable, and you still are going to pay extra for that, although, you know, depending on, say you're building a new building, depending on who wires you're building, that may be what they insist on. Right. Oh yeah, if you're starting with something new like that, you're going to want to go with the best you can at the moment. Right. You're doing the fastest connection possible. Absolutely. Right when you're building or adding a lab or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cat5e is kind of the standard now. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, it doesn't look like anybody else had any urgent questions they typed in while we were chatting. That means you just told everything they ever needed to know. Hopefully. Or hopefully not, so that they have more questions and can learn a little more and get out there and, you know, buy your book, take a look at it there. Exactly. All right. Yeah. Since you guys don't have any more questions, wrap it up. Yeah, for this morning. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Chris, for sharing this with us. I'm really glad, like I said, to share this so that more people who are beyond, you know, Iowa, and like I said, I don't actually need to do this myself at work, but at home we do have multiple computers and TVs and internet and connections, and I'm much more comfortable with it now. Yeah. Great. Definitely. All right. I'm going to center control to my screen to do a little wrap up here. So it gets showing. There we go. All right. So thank everybody for attending. The show has been recorded and will be on our website. You can just Google Encompass Live and we're the only thing that comes up so far. Yay. This is our upcoming shows, but right underneath them is a link to our archive Encompass Live sessions, and this is where recordings go. I think, let's see, the previous one had, yeah, we had a link to the recording and presentation and links that were mentioned. This is from a previous show. This one will be the same way. We'll have all the links on there for that. It should be done and processed later this afternoon and I'll send out an email to let everybody know when it's available here on our archive page. I hope you join us next week when our topic is a very, I think it'll be a fun topic, a librarian walks into a bar. I know we all like to do that, but this is specifically to attend a pub quiz or to run a pub quiz, a way to interact with the community more. The library here in Nebraska, Hastings Public Library, they actually host and run the monthly pub quiz not at the library, but at a local bar in town. Jake Rundle from Hastings is gonna come here to Lincoln and be here with us next week to talk about this program that they have and they've been doing for a while. It's very successful. They have a lot of fun with it, it seems. So definitely sign up for that show and any of our other shows you see we have here listed coming up and Compass Live is also on Facebook. We have a link here to our Facebook page where we do post information about here's a reminder to log in for today's show, recording notices, reminders for the next show. So if you are big on Facebook and you wanna keep up with what we're doing, give us a like over there and you'll get notifications about how things are going on the show. Other than that, that wraps it up for today, I think. Thank you, everybody, for attending. Thank you, Chris, and we'll see you next time on Compass Live. Bye-bye.