@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?
@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.
@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)
@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
@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!
@bezmania yes