Don’t forget to check the bloody cord!

My networking professor, was a good man, and I will never forget a story he related to us about a time he got called in to trouble shoot a networking problem that was being experienced way out on some distant out post. He was not the first technician to be called out there, in fact he was the fifth, and each time previously the technicians had reported they could not find any problem with the systems. But regardlessly, the outpost was barely able to maintain connectivity with the central servers.

He ran out there and checked all the configurations and everything looked good, so he scratched his head, and thought he better cover all of his bases just make sure everything was doing alright. Wouldn’t you know? The main coaxial cable linking the outpost to the entire outside world was a cheap flimsy coax cable that you might find at your grandmother’s house connected to her old VHF antenna. Something that wasn’t even rated to do diddly.

Not having any of his coax equipment on him, he had to run out and hunt down some cable, and then drive back to fix the problem. Once installed, everything was working perfectly, and it was job well done. Eventually one of the operators came out with the whole story, and explained that the original cable was sliced somehow during installation, and someone brought what they had from home.

The story related an important point, which is to never forget to check your cables.

Recently, after noticing one of our more expensive projects had ceased working altogether, panic ensued. Every piece of hardware was dissambled and thoroughly inspected to discover a fault. As we worked our way to the network device we noticed it showed no signs of transmitting any data, and it had to be unplugged and replugged into the server before the server would recognize it’s existence after a reboot. Finally, as a last ditched effort we swapped the cable out from what was believed to be a better fitting and longer cable, back to the cable the device came with. Afterwards, it was firing on all cylinders, and we experienced no more issues.

Lesson learned.