My trip to Sydney was generally successful – the office is now using ADSL instead of a slow modem. Took a bit of effort but I put in (yet another :) linux based firewall, reorganised the network and started sorting out the workstations as well. I was unable to complete all the work I wanted though due to a hassle in Melbourne.
On the morning of my last day in Sydney, I received a call from the Melbourne office to say that they had no Internet connection, couldn’t print, couldn’t get shared drives, etc. Ooops. Fortunately I was able to get on a flight quickly and was back in the Melbourne office by midday.
A quick check of the servers revealed all was well so I recycled the switches and hubs to see if they were OK. Sure enough, one of them failed to restart properly, so I yanked it out and repatched everything across to the spare hub and one of the units with spare capacity. Admin staff were up and running quickly enough but it took until 7pm to get everything right (mostly because I took advantage of the moment to re-run some of the leads that were getting pretty messy).
A bonus was that the next day, everyone was reporting that the network was running much faster. Now I finally know what was causing that network slowdown… The dud switch is going to be replaced under warranty so I’ll try to do that while everyone’s away. At least everything’s working again (touch wood).