So what do you do at work when the infrastructure fails and you can not connect to anything on the network? In my case, I field phone calls for the first ten minutes, then laugh at those who didn’t figure out they couldn’t get on the network 30 minutes after it went down. Play a little pinball, some spider solitaire, and eventually decide to work on some homework only to discover it requires the Internet, something I can not connect to.
Sometime around 9:00 this morning the 2nd floor of the building lost all network connectivity, and thankfully it is not part of my job to fix it. I work on servers and PC’s only; we have two Communications guys who are responsible for cabling, routers, and switches. This is excellent news for me on days like this though some days I wouldn’t mind sharing those responsibilities, mostly because the network would run so much better if the current head of the Comm Team would streamline a few things. But I digress. As I type this, it is now almost 10:00 AM and we still do not have the issue resolved. When trying to get updates from the Comm Team about what the problem may be or when they estimate it will be resolved the only answer we can get is “It’s not working!” My instant response to him was to scream “DUH!” inside my own head and bite down hard on the tip of my tongue to keep from verbalizing my true feelings about the man, it is a place of business after all and I do have to work with Mr. Personality for a few more years.
So now that I have become bored with the limited selection of games available on my PC, have discovered I can’t even work on homework because it needs Internet access, can’t get on the Internet or any server in the building, and can’t even check my e-mail I am at a loss for what I CAN do. Lucky for me, some time ago I loaded Microsoft Office locally on my system, for most users here we run it from the server and technically, mine should be set up the same way. I do not recall loading it locally, and probably should reload it to match my user communities setup after this is over, but I won’t. Today having it installed locally is my saving grace and is keeping me from being bored out of my mind. At least with a word processor that works and my thumb drive handy I can write to fill the gap in productive work time. I can now legitimately spend some time typing up this entry and then move on to crank out another few chapters in my new project. If the network stays down long enough maybe I can finish this first section yet this week, MAYBE.
UPDATE: 10:45 AM … one hour 45 minutes later, we’re still down with no ETA on a resolve though we do now know it is hardware related. Too bad Management wouldn’t pay for that 2hour response time Maintenance agreement, I think we got stuck with the 24 x 7 one which, while better than Business Hours Only, means they have 24 hours to resolve the problem after we call it into the vendor. Oh, and last I knew we had no spare backbone equipment either!
UPDATE: 11:30 AM … we’re up, oh wait … maybe … or not! Apparently they are narrowing down the issue but about 10% of us who are on the affected hardware are still down and the other 90% do not have reliable connections. And so I continue to write and play Spider Solitaire on the companies dime.
UPDATE: 11:45 AM … I was able to do something productive for about 5 minutes, then it died again. Who knows how much longer this will be, but we now know which piece of hardware is taking down the rest of the segment … I suppose that accounts for something … …
UPDATE: 12:20 PM … and we’re up … not 100% certain of the cause but it appears hat the nooB plugged two active network drops into a hub creating a loop I the network. Ethernet doesn’t like loops! So he’s been educated on networking 101 now and the better question is why it took 3 and a half hours to trace down the problem. But, that’s an issue for the Comm Department to tackle with the Director if IT in a meeting this afternoon.
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