Description of Town's Computer Network
The Town of Glastonbury's municipal computer systems and networks service approximately 350 PC's for town staff and public users. The users are located at ten sites spread over approximately 53 square miles. This information is meant to provide the reader with an overview of the types of systems the Town employs with a few examples of the types of software that automate various Town departments. This description is not meant to include all the systems and software packages the Town benefits from.
The Town runs mission critical software applications on twenty four network servers operating over five separate networks that are interconnected. For an office suite package, all users have access to MS Office Suite which provides word processing, spreadsheet and presentation manager capabilities. For an email system, all users have access to Microsoft Exchange with Outlook. This package additionally provides collaborative work scheduling, task management and calendaring. The email package provides a universal mail box. This capability allows users to send and receive both intranet and internet email from a single mailbox. All users have access to the internet through browsers. Most departments run a "department specific" application, usually a multi user, networked, third party relational
database application. Many department applications are now WEB enabled.
The Town's networks support several servers including, Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft Windows 2003, and IBM AIX Unix. All servers back up mission critical information daily. The standard desktop operating system presently is Windows XP. Each department has access to networked laser printers and in a few cases specialty or color ink jet printers.
All Town offices are network wired with fiber and Category 5 cable capable of 100 MB speeds. 10/100 megabit and Gigabit switches are employed as the backbone of the Town Hall Campus Network. Remote buildings generally run one hundred megabit network switches.
The primary network is located in the Town Hall building and encompasses six other buildings (Waste Treatment Plant/Facilities Maintenance, Police Department, Civil Preparedness, Welles Turner Library, Riverfront Community Center, and Glastonbury Volunteer Ambulance). This portion of the Town network is referred to as the "Town Hall Campus". The buildings are connected with fiber optic cable. One run of the fiber optic link spans Main Street in Glastonbury. All other Town facilities (remote buildings) connect to the Town Campus either by high speed T1 communication lines, cable modems, or DSL.
The Town has an internet gateway physically located in the Library that supports both Town staff users. The Town maintains its own Web page on a dedicated server. All internet connections and internet applications pass through a firewall security on a dedicated server. All Town internet users authenticate to the Web proxy server for added internet security. Any and all public access to the private side of the firewall is denied. The firewall supports internet content filtering on selected users and/or groups with a filtering package. The Public computers located at the Library and the Riverfront Community Center utilize the high speed CEN (Connecticut Education Network) link for Internet Connectivity.
The Town has an Information Technology department with four staff members. The department staff support and maintain the systems in-house with occasional assistance from outside consultants. Most of the servers are centrally located in the Town Hall facility in a computer room designed to house such equipment.
Please note this description does not include the Glastonbury Board of Education or the Glastonbury School computer systems.
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