A Day Off

I am having to make the most of today as a sleep catchup day in preparation for the long four day working weekend ahead. My main aim of today was to restore my VPN access to the university which has recently stopped working. I assumed that it had stopped working after I accidentally reset my password. I was pretty amazed that I actually did reset my password in the first place because I was trying to rest someone else's. Because I was logged in to the university portal, logging into the password management system with another account seemed to confuse the poor thing and so it decided to totally ignore the fact that someone else had just logged in and ended up changing my password instead!

Anyway, believing that this was to blame - naturally as nothing else I could think of had changed since I'd used it several weeks ago - I visited CiCS who manage the computing services at the university. After a short wait, I got the grumpy dismissive guy who immediately told me that my ISP (O2) was to blame. I was convinced that this couldn't be the case since I had been with them for almost a year now without any problems and it had worked fine until now. Slightly annoyed, he agreed to let me test the connection on their test computer. Damn, it worked fine and he was right. It must be something wrong my end and having tested it on three different computers, it must be O2.

After some poking around online, I discovered that so many other people have been having this problem with PPTP after O2 upgraded the firmware on their routers. Armed with this knowledge and the reviews of O2s customer support service being very dismissive about the whole thing and being quite uncooperative. My personal experience was very different. It took the guy I was speaking to a while to work out how to log the request - presumably this sort of thing doesn't happen very often but he guessed as I had that I required a firmware rollback. About ten minutes later and he had logged the request which should be dealt with within 48hrs and had promised to keep an eye on the progress as there was no official ticket for it.

About half an hour after coming off the phone, the internet died and so I am guessing the firmware update is taking place. Lets hope it works (and that the internet isn't down for too long)!