Got a call from a customer: “Nothing is working, but only on one desk in the office.”
I poked around a bit, and sure enough, 2 PCs, 2 phones and 1 printer were offline.
Drove out to the customer, looked at the desk and talked to the manager.
Turns out they had run out of ethernet ports after hiring more people.
So instead of calling us, to save money they had bought a desk switch on Amazon and plugged it into a random ethernet port.
Its power chord lay on the floor, unplugged.
When I plugged it in again, the office dog came running, jumped up, pulled it out again and tried to kill it.The adapter probably had a whine that drove it mad lmao
Reminds me being called out to a customer “we have no internet these last two hours”
While he got me a coffee, i saw a switch without power. Pluged it in and when the coffee came internet access was restored.
He only said"yeah, i unpluged those two hours ago. No one ever told me our internet access runs over those"
Can someone explain and maybe point me to a book or resource where I can learn more about the physical world of networking?
This is a very cheap network switch that serves as a great example of shadow IT happening in most companies. Because they were cheap and just about any computer store had them in stock, it was generally faster for an employee who had ran out of network ports to run out and grab one of these than to request proper network upgrades from the IT department. Sadly, because they are not very fast and lack features needed to prevent network disruption due to misconfigured wiring, they cause lots and lots of headaches for the IT team over time.
A good starting point to learn about physical networking would probably still be to grab a recent set of Cisco CCNA prep books and give those a read.
Don’t touch that, it’s a load bearing 100Mbit switch.
That ironically reminds me I still have to remove like three of those.
… Four.
But they are up in tray handling a specific set of things I just dont give a shit about, in an office I never go to, on an air gapped network…
So…
Probably not going to bother. They can come out later.
Yeah mine aren’t doing anything important other than obscuring my SNMP traffic stats. I’ll probably accidentally forget about them again till next year.
Every network loop I’ve dealt with in the last 5/6 years has been caused by one of these menaces hidden under a desk with too many things plugged into them.
The old adage “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution” still applies.
If the business relies on the availability of the thing that’s receiving a temporary fix, you can be your ass someone, somewhere, is declining the downtime to fix it properly once it’s up and running.
I do networking in the industrial space. This is the most truest statement on the internet.
Edit: for clarification I don’t put these in place. Most of my job is doing audits and telling people to get rid of them and then replacing them.
Got one of these keeping a connection good right now.
200M fibre drop and networking cab are at opposite ends of the house. When the drop was put in, I only had cat5 available to join the two. Distance makes only 100M link possible with the crappy cable to hand.
Through the magic of being cheap and having one of these bad boys spare - two crappy cables with this in-between gets the full beans out of the connection.
It’s been 3 months. It’s shoved in a corner that the cats (fluffy version) love to sit in. I have cat6 to hand now. I don’t need this anymore. I can fix it properly.
But it works and I just cba to do a new direct run.
