We had an interesting occurrence here today; big fat network problems. Not everywhere, though — oh no, that would be too simple.
No, it turns out that the only department affected was… I.T.
We’re on our own subnet, you see. Apparently something occurred, the cause of which (so far) escapes us, which affected our subnet, but no other subnet in the building.
The irony is palpable.
And when I say that our subnet was “affected”, I suppose I should clarify that. By affected I mean: no connection to anything on the network anywhere, period. No connection to the exchange server, the SQL server, the file server, no connection to Active Directory, to any file shares, and worst of all, to the Internet.
We had been cut off.
At first, of course, we didn’t realize it was only us. We anticipated a spate of calls would begin pouring in; we can’t connect to this, or that, or we have a strange pop-up, or we have a network error, or, I can’t get to my blog, I mean my totally-work-related-web-site to which I’m trying to connect…. Nothing was forthcoming. The phone was silent.
Someone ventured out into the administration area, where people were happily working away, connected to the network without a problem.
Our network.
To which we were cut off.
Have I mentioned the irony part, yet?
Problem fixed, or, how come I am able to post this if we have no network connectivity: Well, it turns out it was all the fault of a new firewall we were testing; the firewall was on the same subnet and was also the default gateway. So, if the firewall was down… so was everything else. Since we were the only ones testing the new firewall, we were the only ones affected.
There’s a lesson in here somewhere. I’m going to look for it as soon as I finish eating lunch. Probably.
