Back to School: University of Richmond
The Information Services (IS) department at the University of Richmond in Virginia supports 2,800 dorm students as well as faculty and staff. IS consists of a Help Desk group with 11 front-line technicians, serving as the first line of defense, and a networking group of five network specialists that tackle the more difficult problems. Until recently, their only network diagnostic equipment consisted of two sophisticated but expensive network testers.

The start of the school year is a particularly stressful time when students are moving into the dorms and trying to hook their computers up to the campus network. "When Help Desk technicians were called to solve a connectivity problem, they typically would start by swapping out NICs or other PC parts in the hope that this would solve the problem," according to Holly Caruso, manager of network services. If that didn’t work, they’d go back to the office to pick up one of the testers. And if no tester was available, they’d call in the network specialists. The whole process was pretty time-consuming, says Caruso.

Now that all the Help Desk technicians carry LinkRunners with them, Caruso says they can solve most connectivity problems within minutes.  Since it’s so easy to use, we can quickly train students to use it, she adds. This fall, on student move-in day, we’ll have students in each of the dorms who can test the networking jacks and help get everyone connected to the network. It will make it much easier for us to get through what normally can be a pretty hectic time.

Streamlining the front-line: Schriever Air Force Base
At Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Harris Technical Services Corporation is responsible for helping users with connectivity problems. According to Arthur Cooper, LAN operations technical lead, the group gets about 10 to 15 calls a day on connectivity issues.  Before LinkRunner, we had no way to test the jack to see if it was live, said Cooper.  We’d try pinging the gateway, pinging the machine, pinging another machine. It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out we weren’t going to get an accurate diagnosis that way.

The next step, said Cooper, was to start swapping out cards which again, might or might not solve the problem, and in any case was a fairly time-consuming process. The group owns one network tester, but with one tester for 20 people, it wasn’t readily available most of the time.

Now, with LinkRunner, we can solve in two or three minutes what used to take us two or three hours, says Cooper.  Over a month’s time, we figured that it has saved us hundreds of man-hours. It’s pretty much an instantaneous return on our investment.