This is purely an FYI about what happened this morning and our process of solving it so that you, as a user is better informed. Feel free to ask any of us “IT” folk about it for clarification.
There was a brief break in our VPN connection on the Teacher wifi network this morning from about 0750 – 0950. York Zha, our Network “guy,” leapt into action and did some behind the scenes work to shift that connection to the student line to try and minimize the interruption while our provider (GOIP) worked on fixing the issue. Since we have 2 lines – Unicom (for students) and Telecom (for teachers) – dedicated to our VPN provider (GOIP), and only the GOIP Telecom line was down, York worked his magic and switched the Teacher network (network = WiFi) onto the same Unicom line (internet) as the students.
When something like this occurs (or you suspect something like this is occurring) the best thing to do is to turn off then on your wifi. What this does is allow the WiFi card in your computer to reset the settings for connecting to the internet, essentially giving it time to figure out that old addresses it was connected to were not working and find the ones that do. A good example would be when you and a friend are trying to meet up somewhere and figure out how far apart you are: you call each other initially to say that you are just heading out the door; then when you get to the place ahead of your friend, you call to check in and find out where they are/how close they are and find out that they’re running late because of traffic.
If you’ve read this far, congratulations! You can claim to be a level 1 network ninja. If you’re still puzzled, feel free to ask York or any of the rest of IT to clarify. We’re always happy to educate and geek out! Enjoy your weekend and Happy Friday!
So helpful – thanks for all the amazing work that goes on behind the scenes- all you guys and gals in IT really are the unsung heroes. China throws up many interesting challenges forcing you to be creative thinkers – good job ! TGIF Sue