Another power failure today. And the little 10/100 switch on my desk didn’t come back up. You know the one with both the firewall and the DHCP server plugged into it. Fortunately the mail and web servers are in the outer bailey, so they kept going. But nobody’s desktop could get out.
Eventually I got enough evidence that all the machines were working, that it had to be the switch. So I unplugged it for a while then brought it back up. Magically, the whole net started working.
I spent a similarly pleasant two hours right after we got connected, trying to get the rest of the house running. That time it was the switch in the basement, which had locked up after a power failure