Gotta share this one, this is just too dang wierd.

So one of our client companies opens several tickets with us today after they suffer a power outage for about an hour. Brought the whole network down. After power comes back to the building, they bring all their servers and hardware backup, and all of a sudden network problems abound. DHCP's being goofy as all sorts of IP conflicts are occuring across the network, and they keep gaining and loosing and gaining network connectivity. On this end, we keep losing and regaining VPN connectivity to their network, so obviously something's really screwy over there.

Well, after some phone calls and emails back and forth with the main contact over there, we find out that all of a sudden, the guy in the business suite next door can see their computers from his network! Somehow the network from our client became bridged to their suite mate's network.

So power outage, network comes back up screwy, and they're mysteriously bridged to the guys next door. What the heck could cause such a thing?

[edit]Just got some new info -- Both companies share a T1 and have the same subnet. After the outage, they can now ping each other's IPs. Our client company used to be in the suite the other company is in now, and when they moved they evidently left one of their old access points that wasn't working anymore. Their theory is that perhaps the power outage cause the AP to come back to life. So that AP is actually plugged into the other company's network. Now since they unplugged that old AP, they can no longer ping each other. Yeah, "WTF?" abound...[/edit]

[edit 2] Ok, learned a little more -- Both these companies, sharing the same T1, share the same gateway, but are segmented from each other. Basically there are a total of 16 public IPs which are split between the two companies. So behind the gateway are two PIXs, one for Company A and one from Company B, and the each company's network exists independently of the other's behind its own Pix.[/edit 2]

Wierd stuff.