Wednesday, June 13, 2007

So I can’t access the remote network from home. I haven’t been able to get in since last Wednesday morning. I was logged on and then disconnected for a lunch break. When I came back a little while later I couldn’t get in and haven’t been in since. No one seems to know the problem. My cable is good - I can get to the internet. My security token pings as it should. The network seems be OK. And yet it isn’t because I can’t get in.

On Monday, I met with our System Admin and we tested with my wireless aircard at the office. That worked and I was able to get into the network. So I’m going to take the laptop upstairs to try that. If that works, then it is a problem with my cable, but there’s no explanation since I can get to the internet.

It’s a frustrating mystery.

[AN UPDATE (2:00 pm)]: So I talked to our SA and she assured me that my account wasn’t locked and that everything should be working. She wanted me to try the aircard again and then retry the cable. This time I took the laptop upstairs to test the wireless aircard since I don’t get much signal in the basement. That works fine and it actually works great up there. That’s where I’ve been working for the past few hours.

The retry of the cable did not work. So I called the Help Desk again and explained the situation again including the latest steps tested. This guy (different from the guy I talked to earlier this morning) is stumped. He suggested that maybe my cable provider did some kind of upgrade, to which I rolled my eyes because there’s no way they did an upgrade in the middle of the day - I called them to confirm that just to cover all bases.

The next solution is to disable or uninstall/reinstall the firewall software, which our SA is going to have to do the next time we’re both in the office because I don’t have the permissions to do that.

The irony of today is that while I can access the network perfectly upstairs on the wireless card, I cannot get to any outside website. It’s the exact opposite problem.

Weird.