Home >
Actually it was over two days. Two days last week when the unthinkable happened: our Internet went down. Let me tell you, it was a maddening experience, because both my husband and I work from home.
First, everything slowed waaaay down. Luckily, that gave me enough warning where I was able to alert the people that I work with that there was a problem over Skype. But finally our connection to the Internet became completely non-functional, and there was no way to find out what was going on, much less communicate with anyone else. That's one weakness of communicating almost entirely by Skype—when you have no Internet, there's no way to let anyone know that this is what's going on.
That was frustrating enough, but what bothered me most was knowing that people were depending on me and there was absolutely no way to do any work—I couldn't upload, download, or connect to the database. There was literally nothing I could do. And I had the most niggling suspicion that people were thinking that I'd found a new and creative way to get a long weekend. I mean, in this day and age, whose Internet goes out for over two days? Mine, apparently.
The phone company had set up an automatic response that there was "an outage in our area" with few details and inaccurate estimates of when it was going to be fixed, so we never knew what had gone wrong. Finally, the Internet did come back, but it left us with a new determination that we were going to have redundant Internet service. We're going to try the cable alternative and see which gives us the most reliable solution and use the other for backup.
What about you—if your Internet went out tomorrow, what impact would it have?
Tag Cloud
Podcasts & Screencasts
@InsideRIA on Twitter
Follow InsideRIA on Twitter
Facebook Application Development
Secondary internet for working from home? At an office, I could understand (and technically yours is), but why not tether a cell phone for the day or so that the connection's out? Certainly less expensive than another full connection in my area.
or a trip to the local library: some of them offer free wifi
or simply use a dial-up service as a backup. it's helped me in the past!
I also work from home, but there are a number of places nearby that have some sort of internet access, either Starbucks' for-pay T-Mobil or Panera's free wifi.
It would certainly be frustrating, it's difficult to get work done somewhere like that, especially if you have to make phone calls while working. Also, the initial disruption would clearly take time out of your workday. You wait for awhile to see if it's temporary, try restarting your machine, etc. Then getting ready to relocate to somewhere would take even more time, so this could easily knock out half of a workday, even if you are able to get work done once you move elsewhere.
I have cable internet, which has been much more reliable than our previous phone company DSL. We rarely even have slow-downs, and in two years, we've never lost our connection completely.
With regards to "no way to do any work—I couldn't ... connect to the database"...
I find that it's a really useful technique to build in a data stub layer to any reasonable sized application, and have your persistence provider swap between database and "flat file" via a Factory implementation.
So if your live Db call returns a list of Cats, have a different Data Access Object implementation that returns the same data but from a flat XML file on your file system.
That way when the internet goes down, or more likely the database server crashes, you just change your factory from using the liveDB DAO system to using the flat XML DAO system, and keep on working.
The amount of times this one technique has saved me hours of grief - I commend it to you for any decent sized system where your main persistence provider is not on your local machine.
That's a great idea for times where it's applicable.