Networking Disaster!

It's monday, and I have two projects due on Wednesday using a simulation program named SystemVue. SystemVue is a very nice communications simulator which has been acquired by Agilent (formerly a division of HP). It's a decent program, and it does what it does reasonably well.

My point here isn't to discuss the SystemVue program itself, that doesn't really matter to me now. I have the two projects due on wednesday (and a multi-part project due a week from then), all of which use it. I am reliant on SystemVue to get this work done.

Which is why the news I've just received is so devastating. SystemVue uses a networked license. The department server (appropriately named "Electro") is down this morning, which means the networked license isn't available, which means that none of the computers in the entire department can run SystemVue. There are free student versions of the software available, but they are so heavily limited and constrained that they can't be used to do what I need them to do.

I don't know much about the situation. A friend of mine mentioned, in regards to Electro, that there was a "smell of burning plastic", "massive loss of data", "unable to recover", "no backup", etc. I can't confirm any of these things, but I shudder to think about what the worst case scenario might be for me now.