It is impressive to see, how we depend on working networks like the Internet nowadays. Sure, we often say that it isn’t a problem if we are offline. But such days can really piss you off.

Yesterday the firewall of a friend broke down and suddenly anything stopped working as even the DHCP service was unavailable as it was done by the firewall which now rests in pieces.

No updates, no news, no mails – even the VoIP lines (phone) were dead. But why should we worry? We did our backups – that’s the theory.

In reality everything was a little more complicated as the firewall was installed via CD which was outdated by now – but as we couldn’t connect to the network, we had to use that one and tried to restore a backup, which didn’t work at all. So we had to check the network documentation which of course wasn’t up to date at all. But you know – documentation is like sex. Even if it’s bad it’s better than nothing.

After a quite long while we finally had the firewall installed and we could start to try to check for updates, which didn’t work due to the outdated installation. But after a fine download of 2 GB the box was up to date again and accepted the backup again.

I guess I don’t need to tell you, that downloading 2 GB files takes quite some time, so we had to do a manual setup to be able to use a minimal set of services on site which wasn’t fun at all without access to google or wikipedia to look up documentations.