Bandwidth battles in the service of the state

So this morning started with a lot of excitement for me-I was supporting a virtual mission control working a virtual mission to the International Space Station for a science class. What this entailed was running a video-conference and four laptops serving the various mission control teams interacting with the presenters at a college in the east. Unfortunately, up until two days ago I was only involved with prepping the student laptops-then my tech associate and I found out the state has mandatory end-of-course testing that had to be completed in the same timeframe. This required prepping two of the computer labs to run the proprietary state browser and support the testing of approximately 200 students. The test would take about 50 minutes, and would run in the same timeframe over the same days as the virtual mission. Pat, my associate, shouldered that burden while I assumed his duties on the mission.

I'd spent some time planning the instrumentation for the mission, and was in early to lay everything out and secure the cable runs, etc, the way we'd planned a few weeks ago when we did our live-test of the video conference. The first swing at the test revealed some issues, but the second attempt ran smooth as silk and I was pretty confident, even though I hadn't manned the vid-con end of things in either test.

Can you see where this is headed? About 1/2 hour before the mission was to begin, I dialed up the Skype connection for the video-audio link; that's where the problems started! After a couple of attempts, I called the tech at the university-we started trouble-shooting and got everything working; I had the student stations up and sitting on the log-in page-everything looked okay. Then we started losing the vid-con call. We kept reestablishing the connection and I could see and hear them, but they could only SEE me-no audio. We started chewing into the 1/2 hour prep-time pad before mission start troubleshooting that-Robert, the university tech and I, worked both ends with increasing urgency, until we finally had a survivable link and full connectivity-the flight director came online and we started trying to get the student teams logged in-and more problems! We ironed out the mission profile and password issues, everything looked good, but the laptops seemed to be barely getting the data from the website. Robert looked things over on his end and could see that we were connected but the throughput was running slower than molasses! At one point I had Robert on my cell in one ear, and one of our district's network gurus on the classroom phone in the other!

Suddenly, both Robert and Nathan figured it out-we were getting almost no bandwidth! The sixty or so computers up in the labs, running the state-mandated browser to conduct the state-mandated tests, were sucking up all the bandwidth-we had to abort the mission. There was nothing we could do. I'd just spent about 40 minutes with my brain working at max speed, scrambling desperately, thinking there was something I was doing wrong, something I'd overlooked--but it was out of my hands the whole time.

There's nothing for it-the tests are mandated. We're rescheduling the mission to run next week; at least I know a lot more, now. And the kids actually appreciated the lesson we got-sometimes things go wrong, and you have to abort the mission, back up, figure out what went wrong, and come back for the next attempt. All in all, I think it might've been a pretty good lesson.

And I am sooo looking forward to getting right next time!