Lord Evermore
Diamond Member
Dear Penthouse Forums, I never thought it would happen to me...
Oh wait, wrong place. But THIS story is still awful. I feel confident this person doesn't read AT and might see this. The usual disclaimer: don't complain about how long this is, I can't help it.
I do monitoring for client companies' networks and servers. One customer, a cell company, uses a device that expands their network by acting as a radio tower, and sending the data over the Internet with a VPN to a central server, which then puts it onto their regular network. It's a mini-cellular tower. They lease the devices to businesses, and also provide them to their own executives and some field engineers.
I just had one of these users call in complaining that the device's LED was orange, indicating no connection to the server. This person has called in on several other occasions and already knew that she needed to reset her cable modem, her own router, and the Cisco router that the device connects to (it's a complicated set-up due to security), but it was still down.
So I checked, the VPN tunnel was down. Given that it's a customer-owned Internet connection there's not a whole lot we can do. So I sent her to her computer to do a traceroute to the concentrator the VPN goes to. It gets to her cable/DSL router and dies as network unreachable. I told her the ISP may be doing maintenance or be having an outage because the traffic isn't getting to the server that is required for the device to work.
Then I thought to ask, "Your regular Internet service is working okay, right? You can get to the Web?"
She answered "Oh, no, we can't get online at all right now."
Oh wait, wrong place. But THIS story is still awful. I feel confident this person doesn't read AT and might see this. The usual disclaimer: don't complain about how long this is, I can't help it.
I do monitoring for client companies' networks and servers. One customer, a cell company, uses a device that expands their network by acting as a radio tower, and sending the data over the Internet with a VPN to a central server, which then puts it onto their regular network. It's a mini-cellular tower. They lease the devices to businesses, and also provide them to their own executives and some field engineers.
I just had one of these users call in complaining that the device's LED was orange, indicating no connection to the server. This person has called in on several other occasions and already knew that she needed to reset her cable modem, her own router, and the Cisco router that the device connects to (it's a complicated set-up due to security), but it was still down.
So I checked, the VPN tunnel was down. Given that it's a customer-owned Internet connection there's not a whole lot we can do. So I sent her to her computer to do a traceroute to the concentrator the VPN goes to. It gets to her cable/DSL router and dies as network unreachable. I told her the ISP may be doing maintenance or be having an outage because the traffic isn't getting to the server that is required for the device to work.
Then I thought to ask, "Your regular Internet service is working okay, right? You can get to the Web?"
She answered "Oh, no, we can't get online at all right now."
