Greetings. It is another tale of woe and torment from the keyboard of Esquilax! At about 11am today, I was happily browsing the internet at work (as you do), when I attempted to access one of my favourite sites. Curious, I attempted to access other sites that I had previously connected to, but I could not gain access. Unperturbed, I accessed the internal pages of the University and they were fully functional. I then attempted to access external sites yet again. During this attempt, a group of students swarmed up the the office and began complaining that they had no internet access. I assured them that all was well, and then proceeded to examine the proxy settings in IE6. After trying all three proxy servers in all possible permutations, I came to the realisation that something was terribly wrong with the system. After spending many minutes questioning the staff of the University in the adjoining rooms, who assured me that their internet connection was fully functional , and three seperate systems administrators who assured me that nothing was wrong, the whole subnet was situation had worsened. Accepting the slings and arrows of disappointed students I, sisheartnened by my efforts, spent many minutes pinging the three DNS servers and attempting to traceroute various sites. My efforts were in vain, but in my moment of despair, one of the systems admins realised that it was a simple configuration problem, and that the proxy server has simply locked out the VLAN due to the new proxy server address that hadn't propagated through the system. With heavy heart, I resolved to never allow such a thing to happen again, and informed the students of the good news.

Well, there you have it; yet another day in the life of the IT Professional. If only they'd let me get my hands on more of the network...

Does anybody else have any amusing IT stories to relate? Taw? Indy? Grom? Anyone?