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An afternoon without network connection

This afternoon, the network connection of my office computer suddenly broke down. I spent a lot of time first trying to figure out what happened, rebooting a few times, then calling the service desk and finally having two technicians trying to solve the problem.
However, I was amazed to discover how much I am depending on the university network for my work:
– Word crashed because normal.dot is saved on a remote drive.
– MathCad crashed because my license is on the server.
– I wanted to put some references in Endnote, but I like searching for them online and then importing them into my Endnote library. So without network connection I couldn’t do this.
– I wanted to look up some references which I found in a paper, but I couldn’t connect to Scopus.
– I also couldn’t e-mail the service desk. Luckily my phone was still working.

The most critical part was by far losing the MathCad license. I wanted to make one more calculation for my analysis report, but I couldn’t. Since I was waiting all the time (first for action from the service desk, then for the technicians to come, then for a third person to reactivate my computer in the network), I wasted a fair amount of time.

This, however, made me think about how dependent I’ve become on the network for carrying out my research. With my personal laptop I can do more in case of network failure than with my office computer.

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This Post Has 2 Comments
  1. You need to sort your files and decide which should be put on the network server and in your personal computer. It's quite a hassle for cases like when you're in the middle of work and then the network shuts down. In any case, things like that are easy to fix for the tech guys.

  2. Thanks for your comment :)I have most of my files on my local drive, but the biggest problem is that most of the licenses for the software I use are on the shared server.I haven't been without network ever since that afternoon though – knock on wood!

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