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  • Mike ShewardSecureOwl@infosec.exchange
    Jul 21, 2026, 5:10 PM

    i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again; you’re not a network engineer unless you’ve moved a ceiling tile to trace a cable and had a small netgear switch fall on your head

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  • JoostJhelberg@mastodon.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 5:32 PM

    @SecureOwl does a 8kg spinning scsi hard disk count which was not screwed into the rack, slipping out while tilting it? Had a big, deep scratch on my right shin.

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  • Sharpe!Rgsharpe
    Jul 21, 2026, 5:44 PM

    @SecureOwl Does it count if you put it there, you just counted the tiles wrong when you went back through to find it?

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  • Bezmaniabezmania@mstdn.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 6:08 PM

    @SecureOwl does it count when said switch doesn’t fall on your, but provides coax-to-utp conversion? And the inexplicable outages turn on to be caused by the switch being powered by an over-ceiling socket over the office next door, switching with the office lighting next door?

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  • David Seidldavidseidl@mstdn.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 8:06 PM

    @bezmania @SecureOwl "the WiFi keeps going out in the business school lounge, and goes out a LOT during lunch hour".

    If you're suspecting a poorly shielded microwave and early 802.11b APs, you get...well, one of the lunches that was getting warmed up that caused the outages.

    Yay for engineers who are willing to go sit in a room and just observe what is happening when weird stuff occurs. I've got a couple of them who work in my organization now and they make a huge difference.

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  • Bezmaniabezmania@mstdn.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 9:36 PM

    @davidseidl @SecureOwl Oh dear. Don't get me started on the woman in the polyester flowery dresses who managed to crash her PC by touching the keyboard...

    (a Mark 1 Class A original Cisco static discharge ribbon between keyboard and the floor fixed that one)

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  • Varxvarx@defcon.social
    Jul 22, 2026, 2:59 AM

    @davidseidl @bezmania @SecureOwl Oooh this reminds me of a story on one of my first medical device R&D jobs. I got to fly all the way to the EU office because we couldn't reproduce the "Software Driver Error" on the USB stack that kept crashing the prototypes in the US no matter how hard we tried.

    Long story short the realization that it crashed A LOT more when the train wizzed by the windows led to the eventual discovery of an improperly shielded internal USB wire run that was a little too long

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  • David Seidldavidseidl@mstdn.social
    Jul 22, 2026, 2:06 PM

    @varx I worked in the Detroit video industry in the late 90's, and we had a group of P133-based systems that all displayed the weirdest symptoms I'd ever seen. Crashes, but also just strange behaviors.

    Fortunately, my boss was a former video engineer who had spent part of his career fixing video game cabinets. He dove in and discovered that the specific motherboards we were using had bad electrolytic capacitors and as they were dying, they'd act strange.

    Three cheers to real engineers!

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  • Phil Ashby :marmite: 🍵phlash@mastodon.me.uk
    Jul 22, 2026, 12:18 AM

    @dacmot @chessert @SecureOwl
    /me whistles quietly to myself, walking away from a recently replaced floor tile that now hums ever so slightly to the sound of the fans in a SPARCStation IPX running prod mail services for our newly sold off product team.... we'll pick it up when the new office is done....

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  • RyeNCode 🇨🇦RyeNCode@mstdn.ca
    Jul 21, 2026, 6:27 PM

    @SecureOwl
    Why is this section of the network just... Dead?
    (Many blinking lights showing "traffic") hrm... Why is that collision light constantly on?
    Oh no.
    Trace the lines, someone connected a hub in their room to both drops from the switch.

    Edit to add : I was in that office as Software Support & Training for the software product we made and supported. A secondary service we offered was hardware, OS and network stuff. But the people doing that work were overall unqualified. The software dev press ganged into onsite support solved the network issue that baffled the pros.
    Pure dumb luck (and systemic debugging)

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  • Arikpq1r@tech.lgbt
    Jul 21, 2026, 7:45 PM

    @RyeNCode @SecureOwl that reminds me...

    Been to a company's data centre to install some gear as an outside contractor. We need a serial port to configure it and as a guest my laptop is not allowed there. Network tech takes their laptop off their docking station, brings it along, connects, configures, everything looks okay. We go back to his desk to discuss the next step in the project.

    His phone starts ringing. He answers it, looks confused, says he'll look into it, hangs up. Phone immediately rings again. The entire network is down. Nothing works. DNS doesn't DNS, pings don't ping. Huge outage in the entire segment.

    Of course new gear is prime suspect. Immediately physically disconnected. Problem persists though. Network tech reluctantly whips out wireshark and sees very, very strange packet storm.

    To make a long story short, the Dell docking station on his desk had a firmware issue, if you take the laptop off without suspending it and put it back in, the ethernet MAC resets to 00:00:00:00:00:00.

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  • Cesarcesarb@mastodon.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 9:11 PM

    @pq1r @RyeNCode @SecureOwl Oh man. In my case, it was a Dell desktop where the Ubuntu DHCP client got wedged during shutdown (pre-systemd, so there was no watchdog timeout), and the resulting packet storm overloaded the embedded system for the office maglocks. Ended up having to cut the maglock wiring (I chose a red one to keep the tradition) so everyone could get into the office.

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  • Snaprailssnaprails@cupoftea.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 9:48 PM

    @Extelec @SecureOwl

    New shop unit built as a bare shell with the telecoms incoming cable terminated on a distribution block on an internal wall.

    Shopfitters move in and fit out the unit as a bookies, full height grey faced MDF panels on all internal walls.

    We turn up to provide service, DP is behind a panel. We ask for an access hatch to be provided.

    Shopfitters return, drill 4 holes around where the DP is, take a jigsaw and...

    ...you can guess the rest. You can probably guess the size of the bill too :-)

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  • Extreme ElectronicsExtelec@mstdn.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 9:52 PM

    @snaprails @SecureOwl if we ate including phones, a complete 2x4 phone system screwed on to a pillar. The entire pillar was bricked round with a fancy brick wall.

    You could hear the exchange, and see the cables going to it, but no maintenance possible without removing the new wall :)

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  • Snaprailssnaprails@cupoftea.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 10:00 PM

    @Extelec Excellent. I've come across stud walls added so close to equipment racks that you couldn't get the slide-in-units out to change them but not actually bricked in. There's an office block in Reading with an outside door to the cable intake room where Armco was put in the protect the aluminium sidings of the ground floor in the car park. Only small, thin engineers can access the room because now the door only opens at best 300mm 🙄
    @SecureOwl

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  • David Seidldavidseidl@mstdn.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 7:59 PM

    @SecureOwl Folks I worked with cleared out a datacenter where switches were wedged into the mounts of ethernet cables as their only means of support. Those were structural cables!

    My own "why is there a device here" was the hub that was in a closet in the women's restroom in the company I worked for. Access procedures included asking one of the women we worked with to check the restroom, then propping the door open.

    The same network was documented in pencil written on the 3Com switches...

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  • Mx Rey 💜 🏳️‍⚧️ (bikesexual)rey@toot.cat
    Jul 21, 2026, 8:10 PM

    @SecureOwl my network engineer creds: learned a lot about diesel fuel, accessing roofs, social engineering, electrical distribution, and disrupting telecommunication facilities. if I knew ropes better, I could be the nerdy hacker girl in a heist team

    my system administrator cred, however, is the titanium rod that lives forevermore in my tibia after an incident involving a news server with a full disk

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  • Inspiredinspired@hachyderm.io
    Jul 21, 2026, 8:45 PM

    @SecureOwl When you say it again, are you doing that because it bears repeating? Or because it happened again? Or because you repeat yourself more after getting hit in the head repeatedly?

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  • Curiouscuriously@mastodon.au
    Jul 21, 2026, 9:18 PM

    @SecureOwl huh, was a data guy but when we moved to a second building about 800m away I'd help the sole IT guy in the other building, reboot servers watch the ISDN line go down as part of its daily random fail routine, never realised I'd become a network engineer also. Does brand matter? Kinda sure it wasn't netgear, maybe Linksys?

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  • D Ingramingram@mastodon.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 9:47 PM

    @SecureOwl And for pre-TP Ethernet days....

    How about finding the cause of 10BASE-2 thinnet outages was a mix of coax stapled to the wall and the staple making intermittent contact with the centre, or where a thicknet outage was due to a little ball from the floor plate cover coming loose and rolling into an AMP socket, shorting the signal.

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  • SomeVeganCheeseIsOkSomeVeganCheeseIsOk@mastodon.social
    Jul 21, 2026, 10:12 PM

    @SecureOwl or moved a ceiling tile to trace a cable, been shocked, had the ladder fall out from under you, and hung from the ceiling by your fingertips while a senior casually put the ladder back under you

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  • Aaronaaron@zadzmo.org
    Jul 21, 2026, 10:39 PM

    @SecureOwl I've not had that happen but I'm merely a Sysadmin.

    I did, however, discover the 10base2 Thinnet repeater that was powered on and passing prod traffic in *checks notes* 2017.

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  • derekheldderekheld@infosec.exchange
    Jul 21, 2026, 11:23 PM

    @SecureOwl it didn’t fall on my head but I was setting up a super simple wifi network for a small business. I lifted a ceiling tile and found a random Netgear switch sitting on top of another tile next to me. Had to leave it because rewiring their vet office drops was not in the plans.

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  • Fluffy Kitty Catfluffykittycat@furry.engineer
    Jul 22, 2026, 12:40 AM

    @SecureOwl what's it like being a network engineer? I'm thinking of going into it and I want to know what specializations I might pursue

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  • Joe Fahsmokers@infosec.exchange
    Jul 22, 2026, 1:43 AM

    @SecureOwl found a 10/100 Ethernet hub on the network just last year! It was connected to a printer and I discovered it when it was replaced. Not because it was connected to the hub but because I traced the power cable of the printer and the hub was there - powered on and patched in, but with nothing else connected.

    The hub was older than the building we were in (renovated in 2016), so somebody had made the decision to bring this thing during a move despite plenty of gigabit ports all over the place.

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  • Chris Siebenmanncks@mastodon.social
    Jul 22, 2026, 2:06 AM

    @SecureOwl I've seen (well, heard of) that being done in one of the university buildings. It's an old building and when it was initially wired for twisted pair network cabling, they didn't expect modern port density. The cheapest way for the space owners to 'fix' the problem was to add some above-ceiling switches with wiring to new wall jacks.

    (I think this got fixed when the space got totally renovated with new wiring run, but also they never pulled out the old switches.)

    @mos_8502

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