Les Cottrell
, 10/31/00.The SLAC phone switch (PBX) was upgraded with the most current hardware (interfaces and cpus) and software starting at 0:30am Sunday 10/29/00 (PDT). The upgrade was completed successfully by 2am (PDT). During the 90 minute upgrade the phone lines at MCC, BaBar control room and the guard gate were successfully rerouted by Pac Bell to use Pac Bell lines and restored back again afterwards. Les Cottrell was onsite Satuday evening through early Sunday morning to coordinate the activities before the change. Brenda Eberle came on site after the upgrade on Sunday morning to coordinate activities, and make sure things still worked after the upgrade. Pictures show the switch with the Williams Communications (WilCom) upgrade team before (on Saturday evening without the cabinet covers) and after the conversion (with the covers installed on Monday morning).
The phone switch upgrade gives SLAC an essentially new PBX replacing obsolete software and cpus that were over 10 years old, while still supporting the older analog phone interfaces that SLAC makes heavy use of. This will position SLAC to take advantage of current technology and applications and ensure ongoing reliability. In particular it will allow us to support more voice mail message waiting light phones, more digital phone sets both for administrators and for power phone users, and replace equipment that was causing occasional disconnects on long distance calls. If you are interested in replacing your phone with one that has a voice mail message waiting light then please contact your ATOM and they can submit an equipment change request (the cost of the new phone is about $65). The upgraded phone switch also provides improved administration facilities. The upgrade has a nominal value of over $200,000, and was negotiated as part of our existing comtract with our maintenance vendor, at no cost to SLAC.
There is now a big backlog of about 60 requests. The backlog is partially due to the freezes 2 weeks before the previously scheduled (10/22/00) but postponed upgrade. Such requests were put into a pending state and many ATOMs did not send in requests until after the freeze. To make matter worse the rain increases the number of repairs, BaBar has now shut down & several (9) requests were stalled waiting for access. Further our phone administrator (Pauline Guerrero) is out on medical leave for the last week and a half, and Joe (the WilCom tech) has been on vacation for the last week. Though we found temporary partially help to fill in for Pauline, she is only part-time and it is not the same as having someone familiar with the site and procedures. We have a 2nd WilCom tech filling in for Joe. We hope to catch up on the software requests (mainly feature changes and some move/changes) by the end of this week. The hardware changes will take longer.
In just under 2 weeks time on a Saturday 11th November, we will be converting the incoming and outgoing lines, from Pac Bell and MCI (FTS2001), from individual copper lines to direct PBX PRI (23 phone lines on a single 1.54Mbps link) connections. In the meantime we will be meeting with Pac Bell, WilCom and MCI to plan the conversion project. During that conversion, which should take under 2 hours, it will not be possible to make any inbound calls to SLAC. All other phone services (calls on site, outbound calls, voice mail etc.) should work across the conversion. Although voice mail will work while the DIDs are cutover, users may not be able to reach it from off-site to leave or check messages. So remote notification from the voice mail system will only be partially functional. If an off-site caller needs to reach a SLAC number while it is out of service, they can call (650)-854-6435 or (650)-854-7816. Both these lines will ring at SLAC's Main Gate. SLAC's main gate people will need to relay a message to the SLAC phone user.
