Yesterday I had a complete comms outage: first the Net flaked out, then the phones went dead. The net connection came back up a couple of times during the day, but still with massive packet loss. This morning the network is back although the phones are still out.

Being held incommunicado, I learnt something about my dependency on these systems. Most of our software sucks.

My critical tasks for yesterday involved opening a VPN connection to the USA, transferring some files to a network share there, downloading a 25+mb installer, and accessing my build machine by VNC. Completely, completely impossible. The VPN connected (but died every few minutes). I spent an hour copying a half-dozen files across the network: several retries for each. VNC just wouldn't go.