About
this site
The
first pieces of this site began coming together around
November of 1998 on a 10 Megabyte unix account at the
University of Virginia. The site then moved to a 50
Megabyte unix account at Westhost, a website hosting
company based in Utah.
About a year
later, the site was moved in-house to Station 13 (Hillendale)
and a brand new (at the time) Dell Poweredge 1300 Server
so that we could leverage more features and functionality
from it. This server was connected to the internet through
a 144k IDSL circuit.
To facilitate
intra-department communication, an email server was
purchased along with a copy of Microsoft Backoffice
Server 4.5 (including Exchange 5.5 and SQL Server 7.0).
Microsoft Exchange is our email software and SQL Server
7.0 is our database software that provides dynamic capabilities
to the site including the guestbook and the links. The
SQL Server also provides the ability for membership
management.
Next an older
model desktop that was not then being used was converted
into a windows media encoder machine and plugged into
a scanner to make our site was one of the first (if not
the first) in Virginia to bring live streaming
dispatch to the community.
Our most recent
upgrade to our IT infrastructure resulted from the move
of our IT department to our new station on Prince William
Parkway, Station 20. Geographic limitations and the
increase in traffic prohibited almost all of the more
common internet connection technologies such as ISDN,
DSL, and Cable. Our best option, in terms of availablity,
speed, and reliability was a T1. A T1 is a dedicated
line that connects us directly to our Internet Service
Provider at 1.5 Megabits per second (about 11 times
faster than our previous connection) and guarantees
99.9% uptime. We have also procured 2 APC 2200VA UPS
Systems to provide more reliable power to our servers.
We know you'll be pleased with the results!
The future
of www.dcvfd.org holds interactive fire safety games
for kids, continuing development of our interactive
tours, further hardware upgrades to the IT infrastructure
and the migration of many of our paper-based processes
to web-based applications.
Be sure to
keep checking our site for these new features.
William (Eddy) Dumire
Webmaster, Engine Driver, Treasurer
webmaster@dcvfd.org
