On Friday 28 November 2003 23:00, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
And to ask you who else has come across the danger to corporate networks posed by the convenience of auto-crossover ports.
I had this at a middle school I do work for, One little darling student did exactly this. The coms room was lit up like a Christmas tree, a tcp service on the NT server was sitting at 100% cpu.
Deciding that a. something was very amiss and b. the network was unusable anyway. I broke the fibre links between each of the 3 computer suites.
Now the staff had turned off everything but the server as they feared it was a virus outbreak, yet suite 3's local switch was buzzing away. Not having a management lead for a Cisco Catalyst to hand I use the handy front panel switch that turns the link lights into a status bargraph.....100% packet.
So I did a walk around the suite and found the culprit lead, plugged into two sockets.
I found it quite amusing as it's exactly the sort of "experiment" I used to perform on my middle schools RM-480Z network. Then watch in horror as the RM engineers van pulled up in the car park.
It is annoying that such a thing can happen, but to be honest it's no worse than in the old days of a missing t-piece or a cable fault, bringing down a whole coax lan.