Supporting the Widespread Campus:

Remote Support at the Ohio State University

Duane Rigsby - Assistant Manager & Coordinator, Ohio State University South Centers:
But once the university - or excuse me - extension, which is the department I work in, came about - or not came about. But when I started doing that, we cover 88 counties in Ohio. And if you'll look down at the extreme point of Ohio here, I'm just to the left where it says Pike, or if you can see that. I'm one county up at about 11:00 from that point

We have - the extension broke the state up in regions that we support. We have four different techs that cover three regions, and if you take a line and almost go north to south there, or straight up and down, they cut it in that direction. And then they also cut it at about a 45 degree angle on the right side to make the three different regions.

So you can tell that there are several people have to drive a lot of miles just to cover counties. But that's a little bit of background about who - what we cover and things like that. But in a whole, the university - or not the university - but the extension covers about 44,000 square miles that the techs have to cover for support. And that was a big issue for us, so that's where we started looking at different things.

We also support within those 88 counties, we cover 1,200 plus computers along with all the peripherals and extra devices such as scanners, printers, sliders, slide scanners and such. And also a bunch of network storage and things that we have. Not to mention all of the different networks that we have to work with because our backbone - we don't have a backbone for each county to go on.

So they're actually on the individual networks. Some counties have a DSL line, some have cable, some have wireless, some are piggybacked off of another county organization, county office, or something like that. Excuse me - and it's really hard to cover getting bandwidth back and forth to different things.