Network History

Tag: tales

  • Tales from the Network: True(ish) Stories of Internet Chaos [part 2]

    Tales from the Network: True(ish) Stories of Internet Chaos [part 2]

    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.

    (more…)
  • Tales from the Network: True(ish) Stories of Internet Chaos [part 1]

    Tales from the Network: True(ish) Stories of Internet Chaos [part 1]

    Story 1: The Haunted Router

    Dave was a senior network engineer at a mid-sized company. For three weeks, the office Wi-Fi would drop every day — precisely at 2:07 PM. Not 2:06. Not 2:08. Exactly 2:07.

    Dave replaced cables. Dave replaced switches. Dave replaced the router, then replaced it again with a “better” one. He ran packet captures, checked logs, called the ISP twice, and once cried quietly in the server room.

    Finally, in week three, a new intern named Kyle walked over to the kitchen microwave and said:

    “Hey, did you guys know that when Carol heats up her fish every day at lunch, this thing basically broadcasts on the same 2.4 GHz band as your Wi-Fi?”

    Dave never ate in the office again.

    (more…)