First thing this morning I got a call from an Edinburgh property company.

Actually it was several calls…one from the boss, one from his PA and one from one of the guys in the office.

Apparently their office was unable to function because their internet had stopped working.

I had to get there urgently to sort the problem.

I rearranged my diary and turned up at their office at 11.30.

I discovered that the DSL light was steady on their Vigor modem/router, but there was no internet connection from any of the PCs on their office network.

I tried to log on to the management page of their Vigor to check the settings etc, but no one had a note of the password.

I tried the usual ones of “password”, “admin” and “1234″, but no luck.

My next thought was to try the spare modem/router that I had thoughtfully brought with me, but surprise surprise no one knew the username and password for their internet account.

I then asked them to call their ISP which they thought was Fasthosts.

I know Fasthosts supply their hosting and email as I set that up for them, but I didn’t think they supplied the internet service.

I asked them to find a bill for internet service to establish the identity of their ISP.

It turned out that it was a company called Odyssey who also supply their phone service.

Eventually I managed to speak to someone very helpful at Odyssey who did some remote tests and then asked me to log-in to the router.

The router had in fact been supplied by Odyssey and the password should have been “odyssey”, but that didn’t work either.

Very odd…

The support person then suggested that I try the default password setting for the Vigor router.

The default password was that there was no password…I hadn’t thought of that one!

Once I had access to the router management pages I soon discovered that it had somehow reset to its default state.

In other words the internet connection username and password and other settings (including the “odyssey” router password) had mysteriously disappeared.

The Odyssey support guy supplied the required information and very soon my customer had internet access and all those important emails started flooding in.

For future reference I made a note of all the important usernames, passwords, IP addresses and ISP details for my customer’s files.

I have no idea why the router lost its settings.

Strangely enough at the same time their door entry phone stopped working, as did a PC…spooky!

Its not unusual that a customer does not know the identity of their ISP.

It is also very common that customers do not know their usernames or passwords for internet access, routers, email servers, web sites etc.

Anyway…job done and a happy customer.

They can enjoy tonight’s Christmas party without worrying about their internet connection!!