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Every once in awhile you just do something dumb. Most people keep these things kind of quiet, but I thought it was funny enough to mention. While setting up a LAN in the office for computer testing, and ‘Ghosting’ images I set up the switch and jacked it into the network. I then ran all the lines to the individual computers we were going to be working on and made sure they were able to pick up the connection. At about that time my colleague stopped by and off we went to lunch. After stuffing myself full of the finest pizza in Ozark Arkansas, (its called Zacks Place if you ever stop by, thats the place to go.) we came back to the office to start playing with our LAN. My partners cell phone rang, a teacher was having some weird difficulties with one of the online programs. That’s when all hell broke loose.We went to her lab and played with the computers a bit. Seems the problem was that sometimes the computer could find the web sites and sometimes not. We weren’t real panicked, this can happen at times, however we were a bit puzzled by the fact that you could ping www.google.com and get a return, then run the command again, and get nothing but air. “Odd!” I said. He nodded in agreement. We then called our state provider to see if they were having any DNS problems, they said they weren’t, which meant it had to be on our end. We needed to swap out some media converters any way so off we went to reset media converters, after checking those and resetting them, we went to several other buildings and they were having problems as well. Then the phone started ringing like crazy. Teachers all over the district were having intermittent outages. “It’s up!” one would say, “Oh no! Wait, it’s down again”, “Wait its back up,,,,no, no it’s down”. After running around for 3 hours we decided to go back to the office and officially put in a ticket with our district for help.

Back at the office I called up the district and put the ticket in. My cohort walked over to the systems I had set up on the LAN. “Do you have any servers running here?” he asked. Of course I informed him that I did but I wasn’t running DHCP. We looked over the server and made sure it was a fact, and it was. Well, at this point we were all out of ideas. We started working on our LAN project to get it up and running for ghosting some images out. My phone rang and I was walking an instructor through printing a document, as I was talking to him I noticed my collegue was staring at me and smiling. I hung up with the instructor. “I think I found the problem.” he said, “See if you can ping anything now.” I opened a command prompt and started pinging google again. Sure enough the ping replies came in. He turned and did something, then turned back to me and said, “Try now…”. That’s when I noticed it. “Hey, this thing is dying at the second hop.” I observed. “Yup, where do you think that is?” I looked at the switch. Thats when it all came clear. Seems that among all the cables I was messing with earlier in the day, I had in-advertently plugged both ends of a cable into the switch.

For those of you who (like me) doesn’t know what this does, it creates an infinite loop on itself and keeps requesting an IP address that dies due to the TTL on the http packet. The problem with this is that it moves really, really fast and clogs up all the network and causes their packets to die on the network. Needless to say it was a great learning lesson, even though it took out my entire day of planning for other things. Not one of my more brilliant maneuvers.

I called the District and told them that we needed to cancel the ticket. “What was the problem?” he asked. “Oh nothing” I responded, “Just an I-D-ten-T error.”.

(ID10T)