High Response Time

With that taken care of, I put on my
laptop and connected to our LAN, and tried browsing, but this was not
possible. I ping our default gateway, but I didn't get any response.
Now this was strange, because everything seemed to be perfect. I
checked our firewall next and found out that Kerio WinrouteFirewall
ties itself to the MAC address of the NIC it was installed with and
if you remember, I had already changed the NIC of the LAN interface.
So I tried repairing the FireWall to see if this will solve the
issue, but it didn't work. Then I completely uninstalled the Firewall
and reinstalled it. I then reconfigured the firewall with the
configuration wizard and restarted the Server. Now I was sure that
everything would work normally again, but there were still some
issues. So the last steps I took was to copy the configuration files
of the firewall we had backed up a couple of months ago back into the
installation folder of the firewall and restarted it. After this
step, everything seemed to work normally again.

The only problem we
had with this now is that the config files I copied had some ip
address filtering on it. This filtering enabled only a particular set
of users to be able to access the Internet. With this filtering, HTTP
access was disabled for some particular users and only the management
group, or ip addresses of the mangers were allowed HTTP access. All
other users only had access to POP 3, IMAP and SMTP. These Protocols
allowed only access to email. These security measures were
implemented so unauthorized users would not access the Internet
during working ours. But management had changed there mind towards
this filtering. So the final thing I did on the Firewall was to
remove the filtering on it, and everything was back to normal. I
backed up the present configuration of the Firewall, so that I would
not have to go through this rigorous process to get things back to
normal.

This was all very strenuous and tasking
on me, since I had to stand on my feet almost through out the whole
day, to make sure things came back to normal. I also had to come to
the office on Saturday, to make sure things were in order. I had to
make sure everything was normal on Monday, because everything in the
office like a lot of other businesses today depend on the Internet to
function.

Well like every other day, Friday was
fun, but like I said stressful. A network administrator always has to
expect such days, because they test you and the end always make you
better and more experienced.