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Thursday, July 19, 2001

There are perils of living in the modern connected world. The obvious perils are virus threats, scams and espionage. But there also are more subtle perils such as being disconnected.

I've heard from many readers and listeners over the years about connection problems. Most of the time, it's caused by corrupt software, changes made by the user or hardware that goes down. But occasionally the disconnect is brought about by factors totally external, such as an Internet Service Provider that goes down, a backbone that crashes or an IT person who fouls up a setting that affects the connectivity of an entire organization.

You walk into your office in the morning, turn on your system, then immediately send and receive e-mail. Only you can't, because you can't reach your e-mail server. All the messages are still waiting for you on that server. You just can't reach them.

So you figure you'll read the news while they fix your connection. Start up your browser. But it doesn't work either because the bits travel along the same nonworking connection as your e-mail. Oh well, you have to actually do some work. Alas, these days you keep your data off site because you use a Web-enabled database. So the connection problem hits you again.

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As your day goes on, you suddenly realize that you now depend on your Internet connection for a large part of your work -- and that's good, until something like this happens. Now you feel helpless. For the first time in ages you want to work and can't do it. You can't even reach your Hotmail account to exchange personal e-mail while you're waiting.

How do you keep these things from happening? Frankly, there are some things that are out of your control. You can't prevent a backhoe from cutting through a cable outside your office. But you can prevent some problems -- and mitigate the effects of others.

Have a backup connection. Your backup connection might be a second high-speed line or as little as a slow dial-up connection via modem. If you use an external mail server, you'll be able to connect to that server to get your e-mail (or at least view your mail without downloading it). Plus, you'll have (slow) access to external Web pages, databases and resources. Keep extra copies of your external data within your own office. If you don't want to use up hard disk space, put the data on CD, backup tape (DDS) or Zip disk. Then you can often get to the data even if your whole network is down. Notice problems before they get bad. For instance, sometimes you'll see slowing of your connection before a total outage. Have somebody available who can coach you through a problem. No business should do without somebody who knows networking and operating systems -- not even the smallest companies. There are plenty of firms that act as computer departments for firms that don't need a whole person or department. Often these firms have better skills than a single person to run all your computers.

Two important things that many businesses miss: First, identify where the POTS (plain ol' telephone service) lines come into your office so you can have a computer with a modem near the dial-up jack. Second, make sure that you have an action plan -- identifying the steps that you need to take in case of an outage.

With these plans in place, you'll lose less personnel time during your next outage, and your entire team will be less likely to feel helpless while they're sitting idle.

David Radin is host of the nationally syndicated radio show "Internet Insider." You can comment or ask him a computer or Internet question by following the instructions at www.post-gazette.com/interact, where you also can find an archive of his previous Q&A columns.