So, the day itself wasn't particularly bad. Couple of small issues to deal with at work off the get-go, passed by without too much incident.
Leaving the office 5:45ish. Spilled my (by then - cold) coffee all over my desk, minor set-back, no big deal.
And hey, my desk smells like coffee now! Mmm...
Make it home, fire up my my Windows workhorse PC, grab some dinner, launch GNS, drag in some routers.
Stop the GNS project, begin to examine the folk's PC which has a seemingly more dead than dying hard drive - begin disaster recovery.
After getting sick of watching windows choke on itself and the dying drive (not the primary, of-course) One BSD cd and dd later, the data's copying from one to the other. Slowly, but copying. 22MB/sec isn't too bad for a dead hard-drive after all.
Back to my simulation... link the routers, fire them up, brother walks in "Is there something up with the internet? It was working just a minute ago."
Disconnect workhorse PC from the network out of sheer paranoia.
Log into home firewall, check stuff, WAN seems awfully quiet.
Hook up to DSL directly, still really quiet as far as traffic goes... Can't get any further than the office router's loopbacks... crap.
Call sysadmin in PG, head down to the office, better & different view of the network from there.
Manage to get into one of the PG routers, gi1/0's down and down. Well THERE's your problem!.
Thank god for on-site spares. Another hour later, back home.
Sit back down in front of my simulation. Hmm... windows is being a bit of a pain, explorer process has gone nuts. Fine, relaunch... or not. Zombied, great. Okay, fine... stop the sim. Reboot.
*booting stuff happens*
*BLIP*
Blue screen. YAY! And it's rebooting on stop for some dumb reason - not helpful.
*booting stuff happens*
Windows crashed, yada, yada, go-go-gadget safe mode.
*booting stuff happens*
*BLIP*
Blue screen... Crap.
Go-go-gadget re-install.
23:22, and setup will complete in approximately 19 minutes.
I wonder how that drive transfer's going...
