Aaargghhhh! Our main internet connection has gone down – we alerted our main ISP at 11.50am (first one to do so: shows how much on the ball I am, plus I had conduct all the necessary tests to be able to tell them what the problem is 🙂 ). It’s now 3.10pm and we’ve had to resort to dialup. Correction – I’ve had to resort to dialup to our backup ISP: therefore all urgent internet related stuff is having to pass thru me. Problem of being system administrator 🙁
Whilst we’ve got the remote backup mail servers+name servers hosted on another backbone (as per good internet setups 🙂 ), we decided that since our ISP had been so good so far, we didn’t need full broadband access from another ISP (saves money too). Now I’ve got the whole business getting it’s connectivity thru one 56k dialup modem attached to a fax line: not good, but hopefully it’s only temporary. I hope it is, as the fax machine don’t sound happy sharing the line (I can hear the modem thru the fax’s speaker).
It’s not the best backup solution in existence, but it works, it does its job (ie no data loss, still can get essential emails etc), and is cost effective. Ok, if it’s still down at 4pm, we may have to do something major but fingers crossed….
[edit]
3.45pm and normality has been resumed. Our ISPs engineers are still investigating the issue to try and ensure it doesn’t happen again.