It came to our attention yesterday that our building had lost all data access to the outside world. AAPT was blaming Optus and there was no telling what day we would have our data access back. Lucky we have a separate data center for our web servers.
Being a digital agency we needed to stay connected to be able to update our sites and to contact our clients. And since our phones run on VoIP we were between a rock and a hard place. So I did the obvious thing. I tried to teach this hamster to both modulate and demodulate digital signals on this tin can telephone line.
Ok so the hampster (we'll call him Freddie) was not really up to the task with his Monday-itis. So I devised an engenious plan. What if I could run our entire network through a computer connected to one of the spare iBurst wireless modems in storage? So I called Chilli Internet to set up an account.
Before I knew it I had a working data connection on my laptop, sharing the connection to 28 computers through its ethernet port. All that was left was to point the DNS servers to the laptop's IP and then run ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew on all the PC's in the office.
This was the end result:
Macgyver would be proud :o)
ps. The catch was that our email could not
work. We could send emails to the outside world but not receive them. This was because our email gets forwarded to our office's static IP
address. I could have changed our mail forwarding IP with our provider, however it would have taken up to 24hours to change, and then I'd have to change it back once the building's data connection was fixed. If we were given a timeframe of a week then it might have been worth it.