COLUMBUS, Ind. — With most government offices closed by the pandemic, many local residents rely on their phones to contact county personnel.
But getting through to a Bartholomew County government employee Thursday was, at best, a ‘hit-or-miss’ proposition.
Many who attempted to call a specific county department never heard so much as a ring on the other end. Instead, they quickly got a recorded voice stating their call couldn’t be completed, and to try again later.
Luckily, Emergency 911 telephone services operate on a different platform and were not affected by the outages, Bartholomew County Information Technology director Scott Mayes said.
The intermittent problems that courthouse personnel say continued on-and-off Thursday was the result of a equipment malfunction that permits a primary communication system to switch over to a backup system, Mayes said.
“The mechanisms installed to provide these redundancies malfunctioned and caused a series of brief interruptions,” the county IT director said.
Technically known as ‘fail-over redundancy’, the purpose of having two different systems at separate locations is supposed to ensure county phones will continue to work — even if there is an outage or disruption at one of the main network locations, he said.
But it appears Thursday’s problem was the result of a job being performed by either a computer server, system, hardware component or network that either failed or was abnormally terminated, Mayes said.
Staff members in a number of government offices, including Bartholomew Circuit Court, said they were experiencing only telephone problems. While it appears some data may have been moved around on at least one computer in Superior Court 1, office manager Teresa Million stressed she has no way of knowing at this time whether that has anything to do with Thursday’s malfunctions.
After the communication problems emerged, Mayes contacted the county’s vendor called “All Covered,” which is the California-based technology service division of Konica Milolta Business Solutions USA. Konica Milolta is the same corporation that purchased the Columbus-based Information Technology firm TLS.NET Inc. in 2017.
The personnel at All Covered provided exceptional support both remotely and on-site Thursday, Mayes said.
“They engaged their top level engineers who assisted with locating and correcting the problem quickly,” the county’s IT director said. “Their support and continued follow up was prompt and allowed us to fix the problem very quickly.”
However, all parties want to make sure the same widespread disruption doesn’t occur again. In the days ahead, the Bartholomew County IT department will be working with All Covered to make adjustments to the design of the fail-over redundancy system, Mayes said.
There will be at least one scheduled outage in the coming weeks while configurations are adjusted, he said. But this will take place after business hours to minimize disruption of phone service between the public and county personnel, he said.
