It seems that my company fell victim to the nefarious SLOT (Squirrel League of Terror) today. This evil organization of rodent extremists has sent a Suicide Squirrel to crawl into the power transformer and blow it up from the inside. Damn bushy tailed bastards!
It happened around noon today. All we heard was a loud bang, and then the lights went down in the whole building. We ended up coasting on the backup generator power till the end of the day. To make things worse, our Comcast connection went down at the same time. I’m guessing that either the main switch in the building was not powered from the generators, or the explosion damaged the cable box up on the telephone pole.
I ended up dragging a really long spool of CAT5 across the floor, behind the cubicles, above the ceiling panels, and through several doorways to plug us into a DSL line (owned by another company) which was still live. I essentially just took an IP in the range that was handed out by DHCP, and plugged our network into that. So even though we do have internet connection now, we are behind the NAT and a Firewall of the other company. Unfortunately I could not get a hold of anyone who could fix me up with a static IP that could be reachable from the outside. Consequently our website and SMTP server will be inaccessible throughout the night.
The only network technician on duty in the building was totally swamped helping his actual paying customers to deal with the outages. Unfortunately dealing with some dudes trying to get a temporary free ride on their network was very low on his priority list. He did promise to fix us up tomorrow.
Damn fucking squirrels!
When I got to work in the morning, the cable modem lights were happily blinking to the tune of the “wez got packetz!” song. I switched us over, and we are currently back in business and at full capacity. The SLOT sabotage only has cost us 1 day of productivity! :P
Sigh… I was not even supposed to be at work today. Maybe I can leave early and see if I can salvage the rest of this day on some thesis related stuff.
[tags]squirrel, power, power outage, electrocuted squirrel, dsl, cable, internet connection, isp[/tags]
