Information Systems, the computer department of the South African Police Services, implemented a policy to install Di-NIC network cards from Diamond Network Technologies (DNT), to enable them to bring down their support and travel costs, improve productivity and mean time to repair within its country-wide network of PCs. Di-NIC network cards are fitted with DNT`s pre-boot technology that allows remote support personnel to remotely take control of a PC in pre-boot stage and run diagnostics and repairs without having to send a technician to the PC.
The SAPS realised the effectiveness of Di-NIC when a PC in a detective office in the Northern Cape Province nearly caused a catastrophe. Setup software on a 1.44" disk corrupted the partition table, boot sector and part of the data area (approximately the first 4MB) on the PCs hard disk. The severity of this problem is of a level that the computer is not able to read any information from the hard disk (because no partition table information exists) and that the computer will also not be able to boot from the hard disk (because no boot sector exists). The office concerned was 700 km away from the nearest information centre, 1 200 km away from the main support centre in the province and 1 600 km away from the Information Systems head office in Pretoria.
With the Di-NIC management card in place, Information Systems was able to solve the problem and restore the data without sending someone to visit the PC. A telephone call was made to the PC user who was given instructions to restart the computer and enter a username and password when the pre-boot software initialised.
Armed with the IP address of the computer (received automatically via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), remote management software was used to take control of the computer - in this case, it was connected to a 9600 bps Wide Area Network. Normal DOS commands and utilities where then used to determine the status of the hard disk.
The remote administrator was able to determine that the first 4MB of the hard disk had been corrupted. He then initialised a utility from the Pretoria server to restore the boot sector and partition table so that the PC could boot normally. Fortunately, only some of the Windows 95 files were damaged and no data was lost. The data was then backed-up to a local server and the hard drive reinitiated with a local server restoring all the software to the PC and the data copied back to the PC.
Information Systems saved time in travelling (and travel cost, which includes fuel, accommodation etc.), time in fixing the problem and keeping to the MTR (mean time to repair) - which in financial terms would have been far greater than the cost of buying the Di-NIC technology.
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