Wondering why a bunch of my network infrastructure was weirdly slow and finally discovered that the cable to one of my switches had come loose on my router and the eero plugged into that switch had lapsed back into wireless backhaul and was happily routing everything else plugged into that switch via wireless instead but my wireless backhaul is absolute dogshit so everything sucked

My network topology does not seem especially complicated but it's already complicated enough that things can break in ways that cause abject confusion so clearly I should just get into BGP because how could that possibly be worse

("Why do you post like this, Matthew" I hear none of you say, but I respond anyway. Because growing up I never saw people who knew things about computers talk about how everything was broken most of the time and so I assumed that I was doing something wrong, and now I am here to tell you that despite being *extremely* computer my stuff is randomly broken all the time and it takes me far too long to figure it out, so it's not you we just build things that humans are bad at handling)

@mjg59 yeah I recently remembered why Cat5 cables have retaining clips and what happens when they break...

@mjg59 Do it!

@ben RJ45 should have holes you can drive restraining pins through, I want to nail this fucking cable into this fucking port

@mjg59 I constantly worry that at some point I am going to die and then my family are going to be left with the complete mess of a network that they see as "working perfectly" but actually requires constant poking to keep running smoothly

@mjg59 the more computer you are, the more broken your computers are, and the more cursed the causes are

@Mossop I have meaningful documentation along with a "If this is too complicated you can do this instead and it will work less well but it will work" plan

@ryanc Ok but printers are broken for *everyone*

@mjg59 My printer works fine, but I do keep a baseball bat next to it in case it makes a noise I don't recognize.

@ryanc I recently introduced a printer I found on the sidewalk and I am astonished it has not tried to murder me in my sleep

@mjg59 How do you know it hasn't tried to murder you, though? Maybe it's trying really hard, but as a printer, the logistics of murder are very difficult.

@ryanc I mean honestly if a device wants to murder me but has no capability to do so do I even really care

@mjg59 Maybe it's slowly poisoning you?

@mjg59 @ben OK, I'll bite. RJ45 is supposed to have a latch to keep it seated. Was the cable's latch broken or even simply flattened?

@aaribaud @ben It has a latch and also there is complicated cable routing that could end up imposing more stress than that is intended to handle

@mjg59 @ben That's weird. Can you describe the mechanical stress more ?

@aaribaud @ben Not without better art skills than I have

@mjg59 I just call that "entropy"

@mjg59 🤔🤔🤔

@mjg59 @ben Let me try to visualize it then. Assuming I'm looking at the situation as if I was the equipment with the RJ45 socket notch "up", so the cable has its latch "up" and is going away from me.

I assume the stress is the cable plugged into it being pulled strongly.

Is the stressed cabled pulled "up", "left", down", "right" or "away"?

@ryanc @mjg59 If I were a printer, trying to murder someone, I'd subtly alter the numbers on any printout, hoping to corrupt a medication plan or something.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning

@ryanc @mjg59 similar to "in the cobbler's house the children go barefoot", we have this "in the smith's house you find wooden knives", which somehow feels more representative, maybe because the cobbler could think that shoes are bad for kids :)

@mjg59 The by far most valuable conference for me as a sysadmin is a fairly small recurring one where people are actually willing to speak about "this disaster happened, this is why, and this is how we fixed it" and "we tried this, it seemed like a good idea but didn't work out for reasons...".

And it is so rare, because most of people talking at events or in blog posts are "we are so awesome because we do everything the way of awesomeness".

@maswan @mjg59 👆🏼 this is so true and these presentations you describe are consistently the best rated at confs I've helped with.

You can totally skip any preso from big tech firm employees as they've all had to go on a course in public lying^Wspeaking before being allowed to submit a preso

@flangey @maswan I've been on those courses and am, thankfully, able to just ignore large parts of them

@ryanc @mjg59 my husband is a lawyer, I am not the first beep booper he’s been involved with, and he asked me with a very frustrated tone why every beep booper he knows is always like “hang on, the computer I’m using can’t display in color atm, but my good monitor is hooked up to one with a broken ethernet port, just give me a few minutes to code up a way to transmit jpegs over speaker and mic and I’m sure the meme you sent will be very funny…”

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 Beep boopers keep things that other people would just throw away because the beep booper knows how to fix it and will get around to it one of these days, honest. In the meantime: Heath Robinson workaround because the borkedness constraint makes it a Fun Puzzle.

Edit: if you faved this toot you have to take one (1) thing out of the pile and fix it this weekend as penance for encouraging me.

@mjg59 this is transferable to other systems too. See road/ highway, civil planing, HVAC, community garden design, university departmental structure, state legislature bill passage… it’s all cobbled together and when the metaphorical duct tape and binder twine runs out we are all screwed. Even evolution works this way-taking what’s there and making what’s needed.

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59

In Arabic, the saying is

باب النجار مخلوع

Which means "the carpenter's door is crooked"

@mjg59 But could it be that the more "computer" people have more, and more elaborate, stuff. And that stuff breaks more easily?
If I think of the last couple of things that broke at home, its more the out-of-the ordinary stuff instead of the basic things.

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59 A contractors house is never finished.

@mjg59 isn't (R)STP enough?

@mjg59 I always figured that familiarity and confidence (if not hubris) makes people feel they can deal with weirder situations. And then they get into weirder situations, and reality ensues.

@gbargoud @0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59

"The enemy of the good is not the bad, it is the good enough."

"Just because it works doesn't mean it's right."

Gently impressing these concepts on our customers is about half our business model.

@mjg59 This is what happens when people try to make the computers too smart. It saw that cable drop and went "OH! I know what you want!" and just changed your whole network topology without even telling you! Madness!

This is why my whole network runs off an ancient Dell I bought at a thrift store years ago for $25. It doesn't do SHIT without explicit instruction :)

I don't want smarter machines, I want them to be Lego bricks.

@0xabad1dea @ryanc @mjg59

Got plenty of beeps laying around, but used up all the boops for snoots

@mjg59 @Mossop That's my late grandfather's house. We'll have to tear down the DIY home alarm some day... and the multi-unit split air conditioner that wasn't supposed to be multi-unit...

@mjg59 @Mossop

Ahh, so your family's definitely completely sunk then.

My wife keeps asking me "So what could I do about the network if you die before me?"

I gave her a couple names of the network tech people I used to work with who would have an idea how to do things, but it's not really an answer.

@mjg59 @ryanc One of the reasons I haven't gone to 3D printing. It adds a whole dimension to things that can go wrong

@mjg59 I just swapped out my wireless mesh. "Oh," I thought, "All I have to do is give it the same SSID and password..."

Three days later and I think it has finally settled down.

@mjg59 I remember back in the 1990s being told that while decommissioning one of the university mainframes they discovered why it crashed so often, it turned out that the earth was not connected properly so anytime someone with a static charge touched the case it would change memory or register bits randomly. It had been like that for more than 5 years.

@wouter @Mossop @mjg59

I actually know a vaguely similar story involving a very well-liked guy from a mailing list I used to be on.

He got a cancer diagnosis requiring him to go on heavy-duty chemotherapy and was keeping a very positive attitude ("I'm going to beat this with my doctors' help!") His first or second chemotherapy session, the drugs triggered a sudden heart attack and he died.

He had been running an OpenSRS-based domain registry, and nobody else knew the PWs.