Need Internet!

Not so many years ago when I was a tech, needed to use the internet to solve a vital problem. The internet was allegedly down. Contacted the administrator (who had umpteen MSce certifications) who in charge of that area confirmed that the net was inaccessible because they were having problems. So I asked what I could do and the reply was nothing could be done.

Being independent as I am and not willing to give up so easily, I decided to tinker a bit.  Decided to go into the student CS lab and use one of the desktops as a test machine. Having set up a lot of the cabling and routers, was pretty knowledgeable of the systems, Fortunately also had systems admin rights also in those systems. Now for the tinkering,.

Logged into a system and immediately went to the ip settings. Dns server was down so, I used a public dns server in its place of the local dns server.  Could not get a ip address from that server, so I used a static ip address that would not interfere with the network if the local dhcp came back up. Saved the settings and restarted the system.

When the system came back up, I logged in and fired up the web browser. Guess what  There was now internet. Was able to get my research done that I needed. Then I reset the settings back on the system for normal use. More than one way to skin a cat. Never took the systems administrator very seriously after that. Actually I was a member of that same IT team.