What the actual f**k. Tech disasters.

[andrewjoy]

So

I have been meaning to sort this shit show out for a while.

1/2 of the stuff in there is not even ours but hell it needs doing.

The cinema who i don't look after the IT for always have problems with there internet, and i am not surprised.

See that floating punch down with that barley just about cat5 just dangling off it, that is there MAIN INTERNET FEED!

What the actual fuck

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Ahhh much better

Few hours work by myself and our cabling contractors and boom we are done.

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The door even closes !!!

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Top work from topological in the UK, good bunch of lads.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

We once had a customer call up to report that their server had stopped responding and the fellow calling demanded the server's admin credentials to go and inspect it. Something didn't seem right: their whole network had died, and that would not be the server. After a full half hour of arguing they finally conceded that the fault likely lay with the switch and not the server. We sent someone over as soon as we could (with a spare switch), and it wasn't any of the switches either, which were fine.

What the caller (their VP of Technology) had neglected to mention at any stage—that we only learnt from someone else on site—is what they'd been doing prior to the fault occurring: reshuffling the office. By the end of that day (when the last person there wanted to close up), two loops in the network had been located and cleared, but there was one bank of desks that had to remain isolated from the LAN for the LAN to function properly. Being Friday, this was located on a separate visit on the Monday morning.

That one switch under the desk had ended up plugged into two separate wall sockets, creating a loop. That wasn't it, though; even having it plugged in at all caused trouble. On the Monday morning, it came to light that someone had found a stray Cat5 cable under the desk, figured it had come out of the switch, and plugged it back into the switch. It's obvious where the other end went. So that one switch created a loop back to the main switch as well as looping back to itself.

(The under-the-desk switches were due to bad office planning during an office move, as I recall, when we're tried to help them plan properly.)


The other story that sticks with me is a non-technical colleague having tried to fit a wireless PCI card by tearing a hole in a blanking plate and ramming the card in through the hole. This was one of those Dell PCs with the huge bright green doobreys to secure the PCI cards, so it beggars belief that anyone could struggle that much to figure out how the card goes in. I wish I'd taken some photos of that, as it was so funny.