When Technology Strikes Back
It's been a brutal weekend at Sunset in terms of technology. We hired our new IT Coordinator about a week and a half ago, and he got to jump in feet first today.
Much of our infrastructure is dated. Really dated. Most of it is good stuff (Cisco appliances), but it's a little discouraging when you go to the Cisco website and the top of the product spec page says "This product has reached its end-of-life cycle. It is no longer supported". Bummer.
So we have had no internet for three days. Why? Well, we haven't narrowed down the exact cause of the problem, but I can tell you briefly what the symptoms are. First, our Cisco Catalyst 2600 has been compromised. How would I define "compromise"? How about the internal, private class IP address changing several times over the past 72 hours. It started off as a 10.0.0.9, then went to 10.0.1.32, then 10.0.1.60. Ummm...yeah. It's not supposed to do that. We pulled it from the network immediately. So it has either been compromised internally (a suspect a virus that allowed an outside source to take control of the machine), or from the outside, which is even more impressive, if indeed this is an impressive scenario.
Second, when we tried to jack straight into our Kentrox CSU/DSU we realized that we are pretty much up a creek. You see, the older-than-dirt Kentrox that we have supports a very old cabling standard, and the ethernet port that it boasts is in fact worthless. We thought that we would be tricky by sending the digital line from the Kentrox straight into our new Celestix appliance. Silly us. Since the Celestix (running Server 2003 Appliance Edition w/ ISA 2004) is actually new, it won't interface with the archaic Kentrox. So we're kind of stuck. Funny timing, we were planning on introducing the new hardware next week. It looks as if we are going to be accelerating our time line.
Integra Telecom will be coming out tomorrow at 8am to bring us a new CSU/DSU, one that hopefully will be newer than 90's technology. Soon though we'll have our Comcast commercial line in and we can forget about the overpriced and under performing T1...ah...I can hardly wait.
The only nice thing here is this: we work in a church! People have been so kind and patient, even though we have no web access, no email...it's not a good situation. Yet the staff is patient. Thank you!
