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yanbu t1_iwzypc4 wrote

My first job out of college was at Boeing. While I was there a guy I worked with someone accidentally plugged a cable from a switch back into itself and took down the entire building’s network. Thousands of people, including the AOG engineering team were suddenly not able to work. The networking team couldn’t figure out what had happened, so they eventually just told everyone who worked in the building to go home and work from there if you could. It’s funny how fragile we allow critical infrastructure to be sometimes.

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BikerJedi OP t1_ix0d4ly wrote

A competent network engineer would have seen where the packets were getting lost and should have been able to figure the problem out. Crazy.

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yanbu t1_ix0dobq wrote

Well this was almost 20 years ago at this point, no idea what kind of tools they had back then. And they did get it figured out eventually. Funny stuff though.

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BikerJedi OP t1_ix0edgi wrote

It would have been routine. Figure out where the packets are getting lost, then go physically check the device if a remote reboot doesn't work or can't be performed. Follow standard troubleshooting. Check the cables, hard reboot it, etc. You would eventually notice it was plugged into itself if you check and trace all the cables.

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wyrdough t1_ix122fb wrote

Sure, it's that easy if the loop is actually at the switch or rack of switches. If it's some random place out in the building or worse a particular PC happens to have multiple network cards plugged into separate ports and someone inadvertantly enabled bridging on them, it can be a lot harder to find.

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[deleted] t1_ix1j873 wrote

[deleted]

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BikerJedi OP t1_ix1y03t wrote

>I agree, NE should have caught this pretty quick, it’s usually an easy thing to rule out for sudden unexplained widespread pocket loss.

Yep. It was literally one of the practical parts of my CCNA exam.

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