![Tales from the Network: True(ish) Stories of Internet Chaos [part 2]](https://warion.cc/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/vb5pzcvb5pzcvb5p.jpg)
Story 4: The 90-Meter Rule
A company had a mysterious network problem: one specific desk on the third floor could never get a stable connection. The cable was fine. The port was fine. The switch was fine. The NIC was fine. Everything was fine, but nothing worked.
An old-timer network admin eventually asked: “How long is the cable run from that desk to the patch panel?”
They measured it. It was 97 meters.
Ethernet has a maximum run length of 100 meters.
The desk had been moved — slowly, over the course of several office renovations — further and further from the server room, one meter at a time, across five years, until it quietly and politely fell off the network.
Nobody moved the desk. They just put a switch under it and called it a day.
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