Oliver's description of need, from 2017-02-15 email to Brightworks.
Nicole,
As we recently discussed, there may be a project in Physics, here at Cornell, which your team's expertise may be helpful.
There is currently a fully operational set of 3 computers in the Physics Testing Center, . They are connected to each other on a private LAN on a router, which is itself an "island", air-gapped (physically isolated) from any other network. We could use help reverse-engineering their software set-up. One required outcome will be to document their set up.
The documentation must enable us to make changes, including upgrades and enhancements, more successfully and with considerable less risk than if attempted without that documentation. Changes currently needed include replacing desktops with under-warranty systems, upgrade OS (Win7 to Win10), and upgrade FileMakerPro (v11 to v15, or whatever is current at the time of change). There may also be enhancements enable by a better understanding of how all the software is configured. For example, improving or fixing scripting related to FileMakerPro.
Here are my documentation on what I have reverse-engineered so far:
Visually graphed info, with an emphasis on how software supports the workflow:
https://confluence.cornell.edu/x/_we_EQ
Info in a table format, with an emphasis on layers/ dependencies and back-up needs (what data is unique and frequency of its change:
https://confluence.cornell.edu/x/aQS_EQ
One feature we need to understand better is that the two computers holding key data changing throughout the day copy (daily; trigger?) that data to a shared folder residing on the two other systems. How is that being done so we can replicated that function on the system we had to replace? Currently, only one computer is still doing this daily copying.
What steps do you recommend so I can propose this to the folks running the lab?
-Oliver.