Panicky Australians

Grr! My mobile rang at 01:15 this morning. It was the security guard from work saying the Australian Office urgently needed to talk to me. I took the call; it turns out that their office chief is in Japan, connected to our WAN, but cannot send or receive emails. A project office in Sydney is having similar problems, ergo the problem is in London.

I connected to the company network and got through to the mail server without a problem bounced a few test packets around the network and the only office I couldn't contact was Adelaide. "Do you have Internet access?" I ask. "I don't know," he replies.

At that point my heart sinks; he hasn't checked that their network is intact before calling the problem in. Sure enough they have no Internet access - a key requirement for their office to connect to the rest of the network - their office LAN is detached from the rest of the company and people outside of that LAN can't contact the mail server within it. I recommend he calls the local ISP, try not to be too ungracious about being woken up in the small hours for no good reason and go back to bed...

...Where I fail to get back to sleep.

This morning I feel like I haven't slept at all. Damn, that means I'll only have managed one day this week in work where I have been properly alert. I'm sure that's not a good thing.