J is system and network administrator for the Geology Department. He’s not a computer scientist, just a geology grad student who is doing systems work half time during his seemingly endless Ph.D. studies. He learned some of what he knows about the network from the previous sys-admin, whose term overlapped J’s for about 6 months.

When problems come up that J can’t solve, he calls the people in the central Campus Networking Support (CNS) office. J’s network includes half a dozen Suns on an ethernet subnet used by faculty members, and three more Suns on another subnet used, reluctantly, by the department secretarial staff. The two subnets are connected by a bridge and they share a laser printer.

One day the department’s lead secretary quits. This is the third top secretary they’ve gone through in as many years, and the cause of the turnover seems to be that the department head keeps asking for Mac-quality graphics and text, which have to be produced using troff or Scribe. The department has just received a small grant, and the head decides that it’s time to move into the modern age by giving the secretaries Macs and letting the grad students have the old Suns. Some office reassignments are also planned, so the Macs will all be placed together in a new room.

The department head calls in J for advice. His question: What will it take to tie these new Macs into the existing network, so there won’t be any need to buy another printer? (The grant is really small.) Off hand, J can’t answer that question. Remember, he’s more of an administrator/manager than a designer. He suspects he’ll eventually have to get some help from CNS on this problem, but he also knows that he’ll get better and quicker help if he’s already investigated the issue on his own. J knows WebNet is a possible resource because he has used some its features to troubleshoot the existing network. He also remembers the previous sys-admin using WebNet when the second Sun subnet was added. J starts up WebNet. He goes to the floorplan view, adds another room, and drops in three Macs. Then he draws a cable from the Macs to the bridge that connects the two Sun subnets. WebNet chugs along for a bit, then proactively changes the bridge to a bridging router. J sees the change, but he doesn’t know what a bridging router is. He clicks on the new object with the “?” tool, and a simple, contextualized description appears. It explains what a bridging router does in terms of the network as J has drawn it.

J feels like he needs more information. In part this is because he had no idea what it’s going to require to get a bridging router—is it expensive? But he’s also aware that WebNet is a conglomerate of tools, and some are more up-to-date than others. In other sessions with WebNet, he’s learned to check several of the available resources before he makes a decision. An especially useful source of new information, which J actually added himself, is a link to BlackBox’s vocabulary page. This is useful because BlackBox is a commercial firm that does a good job of keeping its definitions up-to-date.

J clicks the BlackBox link and jumps to the definition of routers there. He reads it and feels like he’s getting a better handle on the problem, but there seem to be a lot of options. J wonders if anyone else on campus has dealt with a similar situation. Maybe their experience will help him to decide among the various products. To check on the history of routers and bridges on campus, J uses WebNet to access GIMMe, which searches a database of e-mail correspondence among campus network designers and managers. As with BlackBox, the query is automatically formed by WebNet. GIMMe returns several messages, one of which deals explicitly with routers between Macs and DEC-Stations. J knows from discussions in the monthly networking group that DEC-Stations are similar to his department’s Suns. The gist of that message is, routers are expensive. There’s a live link to a price list on the Web, which J checks. But the e-mail also notes that new Macs may not need a router, because some of them have ethernet built in. J picks up on this idea and does a manual query in GIMMe, looking for Mac and ethernet. Another e-mail message is found, confirming that this is a potential solution.

In reading the e-mail about Macs and ethernet, J also notices another issue, which he hadn’t considered before. What does it mean for the Mac to be “on the network”? They need to share the printer, but how about file serving, and backups, and e-mail, and the web? None of these questions is answered, but J is now prepared to raise these issues when he talks with CNS. J also sends off a quick e-mail to that message’s originator, easy to do in GIMMe, asking how the Mac ethernet cards are working out.

After only a few minutes of mixed-initiative dialog with WebNet, J is ready to make a tentative report to the department head: If we buy the right Macs, they may just plug right into the network we have. (So don’t rush down to that Mac-II close-out sale at Target!)