More akin to the article's saga of Mysterious Patch Cable Rerouting And Evaporating, for more than fifteen years I've been fairly informally looking after the IT systems at a small local engineering firm. They have a rack with about half a dozen servers in it and I've lost count of the number of times the cables have spontaneously rewired themselves or the whole lot has gone down when somebody decided to put the kettle on using the nearest available (but not rated for the extra 2.7kW) power outlet. In the latest fiasco, earlier this year, somebody in a rage stormed out of a meeting with a director and resigned on the spot. Half a mile away, all I know is that half the Nagios screen has suddenly turned bright red.
The firm has a /28. There's a switch on the WAN in the server cabinet. I pay a visit to the cabinet to see what's going on. People are huddled in meetings here and there, and generally looking flustered. Imagine my surprise when it turns out that a couple of Ethernet cables have somehow magically swapped themselves from the switch on the LAN to the switch on the WAN and vice-versa. Wired like that, there's no way on Earth the system could ever have worked. Naturally, the local file servers and the mail server had suddenly become inaccessible from the LAN; nobody can browse the Web; and stuff like that. Naturally, nobody had touched anything in the cabinet.
I put a little USB camera in the rack. I can't show you the pictures, but they're interesting. :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
