SOS Network Trouble |
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SOS Network Trouble - The call came in late one Wednesday from a shipping office in Dublin. There would be a freighter arriving at 7am the next morning in the Port, and the captain had a non-working laptop that he badly needed fixing for his onward journey across the Atlantic. We arrived onboard the hulk of a vessel and were taken to the captain's office. We found out that his laptop had experienced hard drive failure en route from Gothenburg to Southampton. At Southampton, he got the drive replaced, but none of his "ship management" programs were installed and the laptop was still not configured on the ship's computer network.
The network onboard the freighter was really no different from the kind of network setup you would find in any office in Dublin. The reason a ship has an internal network is the same reason why an office has a network - to make communication between staff more efficient. In this case, the captain needed to communicate regularly with the chief engineer's office and the ship's purser, exchanging information about distance covered, fuel consumption and cargo loads.
We ins computer successfully powering up again. But when the computer turned on this time, it only showed a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death, as it's colloquially known as in I.T).
We ran a hard drive diagnostic. Sure enough, the drive had also been damaged by the power surge. We opened up his case, and on closer examination, we could see scorch marks on the hard drive's circuit board. The power surge had corrupted the drive's circuit board. Luckily, after hours of work, we were able to extract about 85% of the data for him but the lesson of this story is, expect the unexpected - always have your data backed up and make sure you buy a quality Power Surge protector (they are available in most hardware stores).