It seems our conversations about data have stopped being about megabytes years ago. When we talk amoungst ourselves in terms of quantifying data, we discuss gigabytes and terabytes! Even that won't last much longer as managing media in the 1GB and above file size becomes more mainstream.

Last month's Cavalier outage that affected the entire DC metro area certainly had me thinking megabytes. When Cavalier's router failure took out our phone and internet for 24 hours, all of our communications were pulled from undeneath our feet simultaneously. I had been urging our Vice-President to consider allowing me to diversify our communications strategy by splitting our ISP and phone service provider out to separate different companies. This arrangement had been setup prior to my arrival and could not simply be changed, as our contract locks us into another whole year! We were struck by it.

24 hours passed and our phone services were restored, how come I couldn't surf the internet on the client or server level? Cavalier had urged all of its clients to reboot their CSU/DSU and I had done so once they claimed all services were restored. The tech support representative could ping the Cisco unit, so I went into my Cisco 2524 and started trying ping outs. It was futile. The prompt read (boot) and as a result, all Cavalier support ended immediately as that was an indicator it was on my end. It made sense that if I was stuck in boot mode, it meant IP routing had not initialized.

It was plausible that my Cisco router's image had been corrupted as a result of the reboot. The consultants here acknowledged that their former tech had struggled with this unit. Off the top of my head, I would say that this Cisco router only had 6MB of storage. If my image was roughly 4MB, I obviously did not have a backup image of this configuration stored on it. Figuring out how to restore an image wouldn't be necesary. If only I had more megabytes! Other tech's I know carry a 40 whopping MB and can store multiple images for such cases of corruption.

Mind you I can't do any Googling to search options and weigh them out. So to minimize downtime, I made the executive desicion to purchase a used router ASAP and do the explaining later. I was lucky that a friend had a Cisco 1721 in his server room, as these pieces of equipment are not readily available at the common retailer level.

Resetting up the CSU/DSU was stressful, but once the pages started resolving in the browser, it was the most rewarding feeling of the year. I guessed the 'IP ROUTING' command to enable routing.... I don't pretend to be a Cisco geek ;)