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Not Ethernet cable specifically, but on the topic of limitations of wires there’s the classic case of the 500-mile email.
Oh no - a data leak!
Ewwwww stastistically generated image
It’s 2026 and it still looks like that??
The only one I know is about the router where the protective boot would press a button on the router.
Classic Cisco design.
So this one time my house got struck by lightning. It caused over 10k in damages including some of the equipment in my homelab.
The lightning traveled through the coax on the modem (some how unaffected), into my opnsense, destroyed the pcie NIC, on both WAN and LAN side, managed to travel through my POE switch and killed every non-POE device, including my main workstations motherboard. The switch was still alive but POE function wasn’t working. After I replaced it, strangely none of the POE devices were affected and were working fine.
Since then, my coax has ground protections, two of them.
Pic of the ethernet cable that was connected from the modem to opnsense wan port
as if we needed any more reasons to demand fibre
I feel like big ass lightning rods exist for exactly this. Just a lot of metal to take that shit away from your house and straight to the ground.
PoE devices are built to tolerate high voltages. Certainly not lightning-level, but you gotta figure that’s not what really ran rampant through your network. Just enough of a momentary spike to fry stuff that doesn’t have safeties.
Similar thing happen to me. Had a lightning strike fry the ONT port outside, the charge went through to the UPS cat5e surge protector and to my opnsense box and fried it. Luckily it stopped there.
This is where I tell everyone to never buy UPSs from CyberPower. I sent them the thing to inspect because it was guaranteed paying for the damages from power surges and they claimed there was nothing wrong with it and their inspection came clean. But they sent me a new one and said they won’t pay for my lost firewall.
Sorry to hear you got 10k in damages, that sucks. I’ve now got a whole house surge protector to try my best to avoid that (and I STILL unplug expensive things like my TV and stereo system).
And when he got to the end of the cable run it disappeared into a solid brick wall
This probably goes to a forgotten Netware server that’s been walled in decades ago and is still happily humming away.
Someone wanders into the backrooms. They see all the usual backrooms BS. Then they find an Ethernet cable. They grab a random piece of desk and smash the everloving shit out of it and sit back to wait. Several hours later, a network technician comes in muttering angrily. They swear at the lost guy, saying something about the belfth floor printer, but the lost is able to follow them back out to a place that is at least somewhere.
New backrooms headcanon just dropped
So apparently the thumbnail is from a YouTube video in which AI, specifically Grok, was used to invent some stories, or at least that’s what the blurb by the video seems to indicate.
I haven’t given it the honour of increasing the watch count.
But I’ll give you a true one.
At one job I had, there was a tiny stub of a cable sticking out of a conduit, and it needed to be connected to a hub a few inches away.
The sysadmin delegated to me because he didn’t want to deal with it. The hub couldn’t really be moved because it was basically held in place by a bunch of other taut cables that were attached to it. And it couldn’t be disconnected.
So, I figured, if I’m going to have to unpick the inevitable rat’s nest inside the conduit to get that cable out or replace it, I might as well just yank on it. If it was to break, I’d be in the same situation of having to get it out of the conduit. There wasn’t enough of it accessible to splice a bit onto the end either.
Many things could have gone wrong…
…but I got away with it. And there turned out to be just enough play in the other cables that I managed to get the hub and the cable to meet.
No-one dared touch any of that for the rest of the time I worked there.
Oh, I got one for you:
Green Stripes, Green, Orange Stripes, Blue, Blue Stripes, Orange, Brown Stripes, Brown
The dreaded crossover cable.
Eh!
and as the internet technician drilled a hole through the wall, into the closet, where my 80 year old martin lay in its case, the top now with a new hole
This cat has 5… 6… 7… 8… maybe even more lives.
