Life on Mars?

I have a sore throat and the sniffles, and I’m at work.

Thankfully I have tea.

On the 18th, Mark and I installed a new switch to replace the old and busted switches we were using. The switch, a Linksys SW224P would provide power to our VOIP phones, as well as make it easier to prioritize the packets we use for phone calls. Well, after getting everything working we discovered that the PoE functionality wasn’t working, and after two hours of being on hold with Logitech, we were able to do some tests that verified that the PoE features on that switch were broken.

Well, we already had the switch hooked up and working, and PoE functionality isn’t critical at all, so we’ll leave it hooked up, order a replacement switch, and replace it when it arrives. After all, it’s still working right?

11/20/06 - Everything works fine all day. Everything seems hunky dory.

11/21/06 - I come to work and the internet and network seems to be down. I try to log into the router…. can’t. I reset the router, and can log in! I then remembered we use a static IP address which I did not have on me. I call Mark to get it and plug it into the settings, along with the gateway and DNS addresses. Yay internets!

Wait, none of the voip phones can dial out. Wait, yes they can. The internets working, hmmm, yet it is. I ran back and forth across the office all day trying to figure out what was happening to our system. I heard from Bob that one of the servers our delicious packets travel through was experiencing difficulties, but he had redirected the traffic. Great! Everything seemed to work… but only for a few hours before things blew up again. At the end of the day everything seems functional, hurrah!

11/22/06 - I come in and everything seems to be working alright. I’m told that our carrier tracking info didn’t extract into PDFs like they should do every morning so I start taking a look at that. When looking at the process flows and events for the process I come to a really weird anomaly where the exact same files on the server appear to be different when viewed from different computers, no matter what the actual data on the server says. While trying to putz this out, the phones go dead again.

I decide I’m going to log into the switch and make sure the VOIP packets are all prioritized properly. I try to do so and then… can’t. Pinging the switch doesn’t work. Well, sometimes it goes through sometimes it does. It’s practically hemmoraging packets. I smack my desk with my face as I realize that the switch that appeared to be entirely functional except for a little PoE glitch was actually not functional at all, and was the cause of all of our problems for the past two days. It worked when we tested it, but when put under the actual pressure of the daily grind the switch could hardly carry the traffic we needed it to. Luckily we were closing early since it was the day before Thanksgiving so I called the company we ordered the switch through to plug our old switches back in while I was in Boise.

Thanksgiving Break - I’m about to use RDP to remote into my desktop just fine. I can also access our Exchange Web server easily. Looks like everything was taken care of. Excellent.

11/27/06 - I come in early and take a look over everything. Some phones need to be rebooted to work but everything is looking great. Our old switches are plugged back in (And actually working), my boss has ordered a new switch and a router to boot, life is good. Mark comes in to let me know about a few changes he made to the network setup, and to verify that we had ordered a new router because the one we were using was stretched as thin as it could go.

An hour after Mark leaves, the router snaps. We can’t access the internet, we can’t access our local intranet. We can’t even get IP addresses from the DHCP server. I call Mark and he brings down a replacement router right away and we spend the next half an hour configuring it. Things begin working again, but we’re hanging by a thread until that new router arrives.

But everything is working right now, I didn’t even tell you about the printer issues. I’ll pray everything keeps working. Hardware failure has become the name of the game over here.

I’m back home from visiting my relatives in Boise for Thanksgiving. Definitely a much better way to spend the holiday than working Black Friday at Best Buy like last year. I can’t be thankful enough for what God has done for me in just this one year, it’s truly incredible.

But oh maaaaan, after days of lazing around eating turkey and cookies and talking and whatever my body feels like it has a few gears stuck. I need to get back to work soon!

Getting back into reading theology after letting my brain decay for way too long. Gonna give it a warm up with ‘Easy Chairs, Hard Words’ and then see what I can find from there.

Finally got a haircut today. Last time I got my haircut was in early march. I do like the mophead look but it gets too much to handle sometimes.

Now I look much cleaner and more professional.

I came in this morning to find that our routers settings had been flashed. Bad firmware update? I dunno. Anyway, it caused our internet and phone systems to die. I then realized that I didn’t know our static IP address.

Oops.

Got it back up and running in 45 minutes though.

Eric and I were called in by our manager, where we were given absolutely glowing praise for our work (99.8% accuracy on our data input/management work!) and our Christmas bonuses.

I love this job, God has been so good to do it to me. It’s nice to have a job which will probably become my career that I can be excited to come to every day.
Also, Pastor Craig asked me if I’d do an Advent reading for the church this year which I’m really excited to do.