This morning while I was preparing for a customer demo that I'll be doing over LiveMeeting later today, my DSL connection stopped working. I have a reasonably complicated home office network arrangement - but it is most often my VPN connection or my unmanaged gigabit switch that are the problem. This morning however, my DSL was down. Not a surprise to a lot of people, but I am with Nildram and this sort of thing hardly ever happens (BTW - I cannot say enough good things about Nildram as a broadband provider).
Anyway, I was kinda connected (the LCP was allowed to come up - whatever that means, and the ADSL light was green on the router), but I wasn't able to get my IP address or anything. I have a static IP for my DSL connection so that is a little unusual. While the demo is over 10 hours away, it still focuses the mind a little - I may have to change my plans for the day and fall back to my "disaster recovery office" (the spare room in my mother-in-law's house) if I'm not going to be able to get connected to the LiveMeeting from my home office.
So I began to try and resolve the situation. Hmm, I wonder what "LCP was allowed to come up" means? I thought to myself. I know - I'll check Google. D'oh. Hmm - how do I gel hold of Nildram customer services? I know I'll look up the phone number on their website and give them a call. D'oh. In the end, I fired up the browser on my mobile phone because my brain just didn't seem to know what to do without an Internet connection to refer to. I found the number of customer support (which is open 24x7) and started to dial (on my cell phone, after having first picked up my VoIP phone to wonder why there was no dial tone...). The moment I did that the DSL connection popped back into life (spooky - are they that good?). Panic over - I guess some maintenance or something was going on somewhere - it was 6.30 am and it only lasted 15 minutes or so - nothing worth worrying about really.
However, It did remind me of the stupid things I do when the electricity goes out - constantly forgetting that with the TV not working I cannot switch on a light and read either. Do I really take always available internet for granted as much as I take always available electricity for granted now-a-days? Very strange - I know, I'll blog about that...
Heh. I do every one of those same things, and when my net connection is down I seem unable to retain that fact for more than a few minutes at a time. The number of times I've started to load my ISP's site to check for status reports...