By 9:30 this morning I knew something was horribly wrong. Several computers located all over the building were unable to sign onto the fileserver. The error message, when input to Google and Novell’s support site, turned out to be singularly unhelpful.

By 10:30 I’d exhausted most of the seemingly-obvious solutions. By 12:30 I’d rebooted the fileserver, to no avail. By 1:30 I’d downloaded updates to every bit of software I could think of.

At 2:30 I noticed that someone’s computer was plugged into a “new” jack in that particular office. Oh, hell. The “new” jack meant that their computer wasn’t on the “old” set of racks in the server room, but instead on the “expansion” racks, which meant that…

Yep. One of the network switches in the expansion racks is hosed. Moving the affected individuals’ network connections to other switches fixed their problems completely. If I’d simply traced the damned network connections in the first place I could have saved at least five hours of work.

Of course, actually tracing out everyone’s connections and getting them moved took another hour.

So if you’ve been wondering, “What kind of idiot is this guy, anyway?” Now you know.