All right, I guess I’ve been doing way too much …introspecting?… and way not enough documentation in here lately. So anyway – what kept me occupied Wed night: (besides discovery of Frozen Bubble on GJM’s computer) Intellispace, the company that has handled the ‘net connection to my work for as long as I’ve been there, got into some kind of disagreement with the building management (Cummings Properties) over equipment placement, access to it, something like that, with the end result that Intellispace pulled out of the building/deal, leaving us to scramble for new service. (In all likelihood though, someone’s probably known about the service ending for months, just not me.) So we had a full T1 (woot!) installed, with the intention to ever-so-smoothly change service over during the night/weekend and pretty much leave no one the wiser*. So at the appointed time, GJM switcho-changoed, and within an hour messing with the firewall/etc. settings, everything worked.
For about a day. Then it quit working (and not even because of the recent pissing contest between Level3 and Cogent), so it was switched back over to the Intellispace line (which wasn’t actually hard-disconnected yet, for some reason) … I was luckily not involved in all of this, at 3 in the morning, or I would have been pissed***. Anyway, this night was the “switch it over for real and get it fixed” night, so that’s what we (tried to) do. After an hour of it still not working, get a hold of Conversent tech support, who reports a bunch of CRC and framing errors on his end. (All right, if nothing else, this was turning out to be an excuse for us to geek out over a few beers in the server room****)
Turned out to be shit cabling between two floors at the Verizon CO, after the natives clamored for internet access, a high-up native *needed* it (eventually I plugged a lab laptop directly into the miraculously-still-working Intellispace line and configured it; said native wasn’t enough of a geek to cream his khakis over the fact that he was plugged into a half T1 as the only user… nor to incinerate the machine after jacking its entire XP Home Edition goodness more or less straight into the backbone of the internet with no firewall or antivirus), Verizon Guy showed up around a little before noonish, presumably ran some quick tests on the line in our server room and then disappeared into the building somewhere for a couple hours, unplugged stuff, replugged stuff, then got Verizon to take their thumb out of their ass and replace the rotten cable at the CO.
* except for email not being delivered for up to a couple days** while the new DNS info propagates.
** or a few days or a week or until the end of the universe, depending on the braindeadness of peoples’/their ISPs’ settings.
*** to the extent that I actually get pissed about things, which tends to be not often.
**** or something vaguely alcoholic, raspberry-flavored and pink, that was kinda like a beer, except not. Hey, if it’s in the beer fridge, it’s fair game.
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