Not So Splendid Isolation

Came in to work today and none of the machines in my office had a network connection. Wah. Anyone walking past my office and glancing in through the window in the door will have seen me sitting scratching my head and looking forlorn. It looked like my little box had broken.

The little box in question provides a nicely isolated link to the campus LAN. It is how I manage to connect my varied and disparate systems to the outside world. I love the idea of a physical firewall between my stuff and everyone else's. Except when it breaks.

Essentially, the lights came on but there was nobody at home. All the network ports were lit up, but not showing any traffic. Trying to ping the device didn't work, and neither did the web configuration. So I tried to reset it. That didn't work either. Double wah.

I was all set to bin the thing, and try to get by with actual links to the real network (which scared me a bit), when it occurred to me that this was a DLink device, and therefore it had a lousy power supply. I opened my "magic cupboard of bits" and, what do you know, there was a spare 5 volt 2 amp power adapter which I'd put aside for no good reason ages ago.

And it works. And I can type this. And you can read it.  Go me.