We had some good news yesterday. Our kid’s dentist called saying they had a cancelation so they could get our kiddo in to look at his tooth and hopefully fix it today!
Bad news followed. My supervisor had stayed at work late to run an update on our company firewall. Well, it borked it. I am still the more experienced IT person for our company environment, so after some phone calls with support and efforts to connect to the Com port, I was called in.
Arrived at about 10 PM. Found the components we needed to link up to the Com port, just to find endless scrolling text. Another call with support concluded that the firewall needed to be RMA’d.
During that time, I found our older firewall, which is a much cheaper, simpler device that had been sitting around for a couple of years now, and worked on factory resetting it, as the login credentials were long lost.
I said it was simpler, and that is because we used it when we had everything on one big subnet, compared to our current one which is segmented into VLANs. I proceeded to spend the next several hours working to get this firewall online and to pass our necessary traffic.
Come 6:45 AM, we had made progress, but were getring strange errors where sometimes we could remote to a given computer and other times we couldn’t, or our Sharepoint server could be pinged, but would not open the web pages. I had to leave to take my kiddo to the hospital for his appointment.
Appointment took about 5 hours total, but it went well and they were able to cap his chipped tooth, so it looks all new again! Got him and my wife home and at 2 I was back at work, with maybe a 30 minute nap while waiting for my kid’s anesthesia to wear off.
Stayed at work until 5, but got pretty much everything squared away. Changed some VLAN assignments, reconfigured printers, added a virtual network interface to a server to make it talk nicely with the other servers.
And now I have been up for almost 36 hours! It’s like college all over again!