A huge part of doing I.T. in the middle of nowhere is being to
anticipate equipment failure.
In the Silicon Valley, if an important hard drive died, and I didn't
have a spare, it would take me twenty minutes to rush to a store, buy
it, and return with it. If I had to do that it meant my support
contracts weren't great because usually I had someone show up in under
an hour with a replacement part.
But in the middle of nowhere, in a country without electronic stores,
being able to anticipate failure is important.
Hard drives are easy, they WILL fail, so you keep a stock of spares.
Spare RAM too. If you can standardize on equipment it makes keeping
track of it easier.
It takes about 2 months to get a replacement part here. So, that's a
VERY long time to be without something like, the Internet.
Today our internet went down for the first time in a year. It was down
for 12 hours, (from 9pm to 9am).
Thankfully a year or so ago, we got DATA plans on the nearby cell
service and sometimes it's up. So, I used my phone, launched 'myWi'
connected with my laptop and sent off an email to our provider in
Singapore who called after a fashion.
They asked me 'do you have alternate internet?'
ALTERNATE INTERNET... what a concept for a place lucky to have internet
in any fashion. But, as a matter of fact, YES WE DID, because we
thought ahead of time, ordered a HUWAEI CDMS usb modem from the U.S. and
purchased a SIM card for it, which we configured to be the only POST
paid card around. (Pre paid cards expire here after 90 days).
So I grabbed a laptop, headed to the VSAT dish and the nearby modem,
(it's down the road a bit), connected via a console cable, plugged in my
USB CDMA modem, and used TeamViewer for the tech to see what was wrong.
I was sitting there thinking 'wow, this is awesome! What if we didn't
have this usb modem? This wouldn't be possible, we'd have to talk it
out... how? Over the cellular phone I have that didn't work 2 years ago.'
Technology is awesome, and the funny thing is, to us all of this is new,
but in the U.S. it's been around forever. Still, being able to
anticipate problems, and having equipment on hand here, means we don't
have to have an outage for 2 months.
If you're a praying person, pray that we can always have spares at hand
when they're most needed.
I'm sad we were down for 12 hours. The really puts a dent in my five
9's... drops us down to 4. But hopefully it will remind the community
that we still live in a third world country and to be thankful for what
we do have.
