It happens to the best of organisations, so please don’t think I’m being unfair by writing this. No matter how big or organised your business gets some thing will go wrong. This month (year?) it’s the turn of Dell.

Our story begins back in July of last year. I took my new Dell laptop travelling with me and within 3 weeks all the little rubber feet had fallen off. OK, not the end of the world. I used their online system to report the fault as a warranty issue and asked that 5 replacements be posted for me to glue back on myself.

Nothing happened.

I chased by email several times, the request seemed to get lost so was transferred to a different call centre but this time I could see an order on their system. Still nothing. I’d given up hope.

So imagine my surprise to see these four boxes arrive almost 9 months later.

A very big and unexpected delivery (Dell didn’t even reply to my last email a month or so before). What could it be that they’d send in such big boxes?

Perhaps they should win an award for protective packaging, can you see it, in the middle in a small plastic bag, the small black rubber foot for my Dell Inspiron?

In case you can’t, here’s a close up. They aren’t very big but at least they got here safely.

Even funnier, Dell phoned last week to sell me an extended warranty. Hmmm, may be not this time. Having said all that, the laptop is by far the best laptop I’ve ever had, powerful enough, battery seems to last forever (I’ve been going over 5 hours on one charge before whilst doing normal office work of email and web site development) and the keyboard is comfortable for typing too.

It worked! I managed to move our whole office network within the day.

Move where you ask? from one IP range to another IP range. OK, that’s only a software thing so I didn’t use a single screwdriver, but the significance of a move is quite huge from my perspective.
Computers on a network each have an IP address, so that they all know where each other are. There are a whole bundle of addresses that can be used in private networks and originally i set our network up on the 192.168.1.??? range (where ??? was the number for each computer). Unfortunately I discovered that this is now a range commonly used for free wireless network access at hotels. If i was using that range in a hotel I wouldn’t be able to VPN (virtual private network – a way of connecting to my office over the internet securely from anywhere else on the internet) into my office as the two ranges were identical.

The solution? Move the office network into a new range 10.x.x.??? – where the x’s are two numbers i chose at random and would remember, and the ??? the number of each machine.

The how?
To begin with, all of our machines had an IP address that i set by hand when I first install them. To save having to do this on every machine in the future I decided to use DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol if i remember correctly) which is common and often on routers (3 of our routers can be DHCP controllers, but you only need one on a network). I set this up to give out addresses in the old network space and went round every computer, printer and server to make it get it’s IP address from the DHCP server. That took a couple of hours but at the end I could see that the router knew about every machine on our network.
Then, I changed the router to give out addresses in the new network and restarted every computer, printer and server. Checking the router again I could see that all the machines were known about on the new network.

Now the boring bit, I never gave our printers fully qualified host/domain names. If I had chosen to call them things like “laser.rkbb.co.uk” (i tend to use that domain for things inside the office because it is short) then all the PC’s would have been able to print to them at their new address. As I hadn’t done that, I had to go to every machine and manually change the printer settings to point at their new address. From this point on I might start giving every machine on our network a fully qualified domain name.

The bottom line: I moved the whole network in a day, and it worked. I do like it when computers work the way I expect them too 🙂