Back to Work: Fixing Network Problems, Not Heart Problems

Sometimes, the best way to process a life-changing event is to return to the things you know how to fix. After weeks of monitoring heart rates, blood pressure, and recovery timelines, I finally stepped back into my role as a Senior Network Administrator. Most people dread walking into a network outage, but for me, it was a breath of fresh air. At TenFootStripes, we talk about noticing the details on the road, but lately, I’ve been noticing the beauty in a different kind of detail: a stable connection and a problem that has a clear solution.

Blinking lights and cooling fans—a much quieter kind of intensity than a hospital recovery room.

With Cerinia's recent heart surgery my full-time job was making sure she rested, took her meds (the right meds!), and didn’t try to sneak off and do things she wasn’t supposed to (which she absolutely did). But after weeks of medical drama, it was time to get back to my normal routine—keeping networks alive instead of spouses. 😂

The Joy of Broken Networks

Walking into work felt like stepping onto a battlefield I actually knew how to fight on. “He’s back!” they said. “We have a remote site down!” they said. Ohhhh, heck yeah!

While I was out a tech at one of our local sites moved our equipment and somehow factory reset it. Our ASA was behind it, and it broke the connection to us in a weird way. The link was bouncing up and down every 20 seconds. So, the connection would only work for 20 seconds at a time! That's weird, not to mention unusable... Debugging IKE showed me that it was using the wrong identifier to connect (it's wan IP). What a simple fix! Static the correct address back on the WAN interface and all was good.

Man, was this great. No one was asking me about blood pressure readings. I wasn't watching heart rates to make sure there wasn't any AFIB. And best of all? If something *really* stopped working, I could just replace it instead of rushing to the hospital. whew....

Perspective is Everything

All jokes aside, stepping away from work to take care of Cerinia reminded me how much I appreciate the things I used to take for granted—both in life and at the office. I missed my job, my coworkers, and even the weird problems that only seem to happen when I’m not around. But more than that, I missed the normalcy. When you spend weeks focused on something as serious as heart surgery, even a major network outage feels like a breath of fresh air.

Cerinia is on the mend now, and I’m back to being the guy who monitors and keeps the network running instead of monitoring heart rates and fluid intake...most of the time. I still take a couple of days off a week for Cerinia's doctor appointments and what not (she hasn't been released to drive) but let me tell you—between the two, I’ll take a network outage over a hospital stay *any day*.

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While You’re Here...

If you enjoyed the "behind the scenes" of a Network Admin's life, you might find these other technical deep-dives interesting:

• Tackling the Tow Setup: Every network has a backbone, and for us, it's the 4Runner. Check out our review of the REDARC Tow-Pro Liberty and how it changed our towing setup.
• The War on Scams: My IT brain couldn't let this one go. Read about the time I spent 65 Minutes on the Phone with a Scammer to see their tactics firsthand.
• Streamlining the Rig: See how I moved our camper's "network" away from messy apps and onto a dedicated system in Ditching RV App Clutter.