Urge to kill co-worker rising
About 2 to 3 hours ago, all internet access to sites outside our internal network dropped inexplicably. At first, I thought it might just be a sporadic outage -- it happens sometimes -- after two other people reported the same thing to me. We've had little outages before, and it's usually a matter of logging into the router, checking the connection, switching over to the backup, and we're all good.
This time, however, the router wasn't responding at all. It was plugged in, and the lights showed a good connection, but all attempts to hit it via its web interface failed. It was like it was gone. All work in the office ground to a standstill while we tried to figure out what was going on. Our design department was trying to upload the new version of the company website today, and couldn't do anything without a connection, as our public server is outside of the local network. The person who set up the router is out on vacation this week, so we couldn't get much help from him.
Then, the first person who'd asked me if I was also having net connection problems came to a realization. The little Bluetooth transmitter he'd picked up over the weekend to play with might be the cause. He brought it in from home, hooked it up to his workstation... and then proceeded to give it an internal IP address ending in .0.1. Yep; the same as our router. This is not the first time he's hosed our network -- he once was downloading movies via bittorrent during business hours, which brought network traffic to a crawl. Anyway, he finally unhooked his Bluetooth transmitter, and voila, everyone has a connection again.
His response to all of this? "Oops. My bad."
This time, however, the router wasn't responding at all. It was plugged in, and the lights showed a good connection, but all attempts to hit it via its web interface failed. It was like it was gone. All work in the office ground to a standstill while we tried to figure out what was going on. Our design department was trying to upload the new version of the company website today, and couldn't do anything without a connection, as our public server is outside of the local network. The person who set up the router is out on vacation this week, so we couldn't get much help from him.
Then, the first person who'd asked me if I was also having net connection problems came to a realization. The little Bluetooth transmitter he'd picked up over the weekend to play with might be the cause. He brought it in from home, hooked it up to his workstation... and then proceeded to give it an internal IP address ending in .0.1. Yep; the same as our router. This is not the first time he's hosed our network -- he once was downloading movies via bittorrent during business hours, which brought network traffic to a crawl. Anyway, he finally unhooked his Bluetooth transmitter, and voila, everyone has a connection again.
His response to all of this? "Oops. My bad."