On schedule, we successfully moved our office from the original sight-seeing building on the construction site of the upcoming Oriental Fishermen Harbour up the Huangpu River, which was general believed that we were kicked out of such a golded location. Although the present office building still stands by the Huangpu river, the location, however, is far less precious than the former one. It's on a relatively remote artificial island which is separated from the mainland of Yangpu District by a canal.

The new offices don't seem to welcome its new masters. The first day when we moved in was a nightmare to all the company staff. There were only 3 phone lines out of 39 that can be got through, and there was only LAN but no WAN. Water didn't flow out of the taps, but dropped. And the cleaner kept complaining about our footprints left on her just-cleaned white and clear marble ground.

That was not all. The 2nd day continued to be terrible. The WAN was always unavailable, so online jobs had to be suspended. The windows facing east couldn't be opened, as the noise made by the heavy trucks and trailers might make your voice no louder than a mosquito. The windows facing west couldn't opened either, as the strong wind might change your document arrangement on desks. With all the windows closed, we were forced to inhale intensive gases of formaldehyde and benzene, exposing ourselves under the threat of cancer.

The office looks marvelous from inside and outside, and the infrastructure is outstanding too. Except electricity, nothing works properly.

I have to talk something about our dear LAN.

The smart LAN administrator set up a complicated LAN system with 5 routers and 10 switches. The LAN framework contains 3 layers, which I hadn't never seen before.

                                LAN -- Sub-Router 1 -- 2*Switches -- about 15 computers
                                LAN -- Sub-Router 2 -- 2*Switches -- about 20 computers
ADSL Modem-Main Router 1*WAN，4*LAN -- Sub-Router 3 -- 4*Switches -- about 40 computers
                                LAN -- Sub-Router 4 -- 2*Switches -- about 25 computers


Since the first day we moved in, the LAN continued its malfunction. There were always three sub-routers that can work properly, leaving the fourth one's WAN port DATA transfer disrupted from time to time. The Sub-router 1 works well all the time. The problems only happened to the other three, esp. Sub-router 4, which served our company. The SB LAN admin insisted at first that the problems were aroused by intranet ARP cheat, asking me to locate the problematic machine and reinstall the OS. If the problems still existed, a HDD repartition was suggested. Then, suspiciously, I followed his instructions. After locating and OS reinstalling of 2 computers, I couldn't find any more machines transmitting ARP cheat, but the internet was even worsened. It was disconnected, until the LAN admin came and reconfigured the routers. The day following, we enjoyed for the first time the speed and smoothness of the 10M OCN cable, while the sub-router 3 was disconnected all day long. Then the fourth day, we were disconnected again. I took my laptop into the server station to check if there were any hardware errors on the server system.

I unplugged all the LAN cables on the disconnected sub-router 4, then connected my laptop onto it. I tried to ping the main router to prove that ARP wasn't the key problem. I was proved right, as the laptop cannot reach the main router with the ping command. I skipped the sub-router and connected my laptop directly onto the main router, and I again pinged the main router with the command ping 192.168.1.1 -t, the packs were returned without a single lost. Then I connected the switches directly onto the main router, it didn't work either. The problem was paradoxical. ... To be continued...