|
Buffalo
County, Nebraska >
Tools
& Resources >
BuffaloWatch
>
About BuffaloWatch
As Buffalo County embarked on the deployment of BuffaloWatch
we discussed its benefits with representatives from Public
Safety, Education, Medicine, Factories and Office complexes.
In each case we where assured that such a service would be
a great benefit to the citizens of Buffalo County and surrounding
areas.
In deploying BuffaloWatch we made every attempt to remove
the barriers that come with the 'commercial' products available
on the internet.
BuffaloWatch is sponsored solely by Buffalo County and contains
no ads. The development cost have been underwritten by funds
from Buffalo County and private donations.
 BuffaloWatch
can rest in the 'tray' and never be called upon other than
when an alert is sent from the Buffalo County LEC, Amber Alert
or Nationally (such as a change in the Homeland Security status).
It has been designed so that alerts that effect only a portion
of the county and not all of the county can be directed only
to that area. To accomplish this 'no cookies' are used if
the application is installed and run without modification.
Should the user change the 'Local Forecast' page to a zip
code other than 68847 then a 'cookie' would be placed to record
that change of information needed.
BuffaloWatch, 'Weather Bug' and network congestion. BuffaloWatch
utilizes a built-in cache server that retrieves the information
from the Internet and then distributes the updates to all
of the machines on the network.
There are 2 ways to setup the cache server.
One is automatic and is called the Roving Cache Server. It
operates with no setup and no user/admin intervention whatsoever.
It operates like this: The first app to be started on the
network sets itself as the cache server and all other apps
connect to it to get the data. Now, if the app that is acting
as the cache server gets shut down the very next app that
tries to get info from it will know that the cache server
is no longer available and it will then become the cache server.
Secondly, is to use a command line option to force a specific
app to be the cache server.
According to the network monitoring and testing provided
by the City of Lincoln and Lancaster County, a network with
2,000 desktops running a sister application called 'InterLinc'
will only use bandwidth equivalent to a single streaming video.
With this in mind our research showed that Lincoln has the
hospitals, Department of Health, schools, private industry
and the general public all in the emergency communication
loop.
|
