Removal of wired networking from buildings

[mevans]

We have 3 buildings in our stake and the new upgrade has been completed in all of them. The contractors do a very nice job.

The techs came from a company in Utah. They told us they've been going all over California from the lower central valley to the Mexican border. I think someone drove a truck here that they drive from site to site. They work a 4-day week and fly home for the weekend. They're nice people. We managed to preserve a few wired ports, but that's no guarantee (we didn't get everything we would have liked). If you happen to have some boxes of CAT 6 available, they might be nice and pull some of it for you and terminate it at the patch panel and at the other end.

The approved system does have provision for a camera jack in the chapel. You potentially have some discretion about where that jack goes.
The approved system also runs lines to the audio rack and for door control (I didn't think Kindoo was network connected). Only one of our buildings has a new enough audio system that it's connected to the network, but they run the line to your audio rack so that it's there for whenever you get an audio system upgrade. At our stake center, video is in a different rack than audio, and they wouldn't run a line to the video rack.

They do eventually upload documentation and photos to CNM.

They later came back to one of our buildings and installed an additional AP in the overflow between the chapel and the cultural hall. It sounds like they're doing that on similar buildings. This particular non-stake center building model was built all over the place in the 1970s (slight floorplan variations and facade changes, but overall, the same thing). I've seen them in several states and even in Mexico. It's all brick, including the classrooms, so Wifi signals don't go far. But now we have good WiFi in the building.

[phruby]

It makes no sense to remove ethernet connections from clerk computers for wifi instead. Once the new network is installed, no one configures the computers or tells the tech specialists that it was even done or even plugs them into the new switches. All this does is cause problems getting past terms of service screens on Chromebooks since the computer can't get past the splash screen.

I guess if you can't be fired, you can do a bad job.

[mevans]

It makes no sense to remove ethernet connections from clerk computers for wifi instead.

What's happening is that the new rack may be in a different location than the current location where the current ethernet lines to the clerk offices go. I agree it makes sense that the clerk offices should get wired jacks. We ended up with wired jacks for all of our clerk offices. When this project comes your way, you might have to get creative in how to achieve that goal.

For example, in one building, the new rack is in the library, but the cable modem is in a clerk's office (we're not sure why they didn't relocate the cable modem; it would have made more sense, but maybe they don't have coax). Since they had to pull a line from the clerk's office to the library, our facilities person got them to pull two lines. Then we plugged the second line into the new switch in the library and into the old switch that was in the clerk's office. This let us feed our old network with lines going to the clerk's offices. It'll work for now, but when our old switches die, I don't think HQ is going to replace them. Then it might be up to us to run some new lines from the clerk's offices to the library.

If you're trying to run your clerk computers off of WiFi: I learned there are some settings in CNM to allow you to enter MAC addresses of computers so they can bypass the Liahona agreement prompt (use the NoSplash policy: https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/wi ... p_Policies). But that's not a great solution, either, because these devices are on the Liahona network that might be disabled. If clerk computers are on WiFi, they really should be on the Lehi network, but then you have to change the password every 90 days. It doesn't appear they thought through how this new policy affects clerk computers.