Without a mentor

I went to the office as early as 8:09 in the morning though my regular login time is 8:30 for the reason that I want to spend more time in the company to maximize my learning. As usual, I did the daily routine tasks in the morning. Checking servers and services if all is well and running fine and noticed after a while that my mentor is not yet around. After confirming that everything is ok, I setup our monitoring laptop for server/services unavailability notification/information. Although they were just multiple windows of the old and boring, yet powerful Command Prompts with ping commands running with the –t option added, they never fail to serve their purpose.

I was deeply impressed while searching for an open source Network Management System when I found openNMS and started reading its features.

Because it is free and offers more functions than that boring command prompt which don’t really do the ‘notifying’ thing but instead just shows an endless “Request timed out” when a host is unavailable, I was excited and continue reading further with seriousness.

Because I enjoyed reading the openNMS’ About page, I completely lost focus on my monitoring laptop and was suddenly disturbed when someone on the opposite table in front of me asks “Walay internet bai?”. I automatically turned and look at my monitoring laptop and saw the awful list of “Request timed out” continuously running on 2 of the five command prompt windows.

I immediately check all possible cause of the problem. Since all PCs failed to connect to the internet, I concluded that the Proxy Server which is running SLES11 could be the problem. I immediately opened Putty so I could ssh to the proxy.  It turns out that all are fine inside the machine. Squid is running well and all interfaces are up. No other configurations changed. So I turned to the modem, but its DSL led is lighting green and is blinking which means there is an activity going on. After observing for quite sometime while pinging www.google.com, one reply shows that it originates from our public IP address with the “Destination host unreachable” tag in it. At that time, I was thinking that the problem isn’t in our network but on the ISPs side. I also found out that when I try to enter Google’s IP address manually on my omnibar, Google’s page appear but takes too long to load. This led me to think that our ISP's DNS could be the problem. So I called help from the Systems admin from our other site. After a couple of minutes, he arrived at the office and started checking from physical connections to proxy and modem configurations. Then finally, he called our ISPs help desk and filed a ticket. The result – some problem is occurring on the side of our ISP due to bad weather and will be fixed probably the next morning.

Our internet downtime lasts almost until 4:00 in the afternoon after we decided that we should switch internet connection from our other ISP. After the connection was temporarily restored, I finally feel easy and started to move slower than the time when the problem was still on. Then I realize that it isn’t really easy handling and maintaining a company’s network infrastructure when you don’t have enough knowledge about networking. Good thing I learned about all of these things, so that I was able to at least describe to my other mentor, what could be the possible problem after doing my initial troubleshooting.

You might be wondering why I wasn’t affected when the internet connection was cut but instead continue reading about openNMS and was informed by someone else. Well, I really find it hard when testing two internet connections’ speed through switching my LAN’s gateway. So I searched the whole internet and found SwitchySharp. It’s an extension from Google Chrome that let’s you switch different gateways on your browser(Chrome only) without changing your LANs gateway as long as the two gateways “see” each other. I was actually doing a Speedtest before the problem occurred and forgot to switch back my connection to the other one which failed. Good thing I have this handy extension. For more information about SwitchySharp just go to their website here or search it directly from Chrome’s extension page.