Thin Ethernet

Posted by jasondbk@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 89 comments

I installed a small network of Mac SE computers in a small school district office. This was back around 1988 or so. The network cables were thin Ethernet.

A few weeks when by and I got an emergency call to go and fix the network. It was a 4 hour drive from my current client to this one. I get there and after a little looking around, I find one computer without the terminator. Her desk didn’t face a wall so people could walk past the “back” of her desk.

When I asked her, she said that the “thing” didn’t have a cable so she just took it (the terminator) off and threw it away.

Not having any spares with me, I went to Radio Shack and bought the terminator and a BNC plug and made one on the spot. Problem fixed!

I told her to never remove that part and left.

A week later, I get another emergency call to the same location. Sure enough, there was no terminator on her Mac. Again.

This time I had spares in my car!

As I replaced it I asked her, “do you feel ok?”

Customer: “Yes I feel fine.”

Me: “Not lightheaded or anything?”

Customer: “No, I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

Me: “Well, it’s called Ethernet. They use Ether to insulate the wires. I don’t want you to inhale too much and pass out!”

She never touched the terminator again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

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s1rp0p0@reddit

Sometimes you need to weaponize stupidity. It can always backfire though. Luckily you didn't make her hysteric and leave her to run through the school, throwing away all the dangerous Ether adapters.

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amishbill@reddit

A broadcast engineer did something similar at a transmitter tower. It was near a college, and frat guys had a habit of climbing it for misc shenanigans.

A sign went up about it being a danger area with possible reproductive damage…. The climbing stopped and a fair few frat guys were seen at campus medical…

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white_nerdy@reddit

This is what a broadcast tower can do to a hot dog. Climbing it seems like a Really Bad Idea.

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st33p@reddit

Those signs aren't just for show. In many jurisdictions they are required by law. If there was a microwave antenna on that tower, there's a chance they boiled their nuts (quite literally!) climbing it.😬

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amishbill@reddit

AM/FM/TV type transmission company.

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Langager90@reddit

Mmm... Roasted Almonds...

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AngryCod@reddit

"No, I'm fine. Why do you ask?" Well, you keep throwing away the thing I specifically told you not to touch so I assume you've either got some sort of dementia or you're deliberately sabotaging the equipment and I need to know which one for my report.

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KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit

This is The Way. Make them realise that their actions have consequences, and those consequences can be painful.

Years ago, one friend kicked a player out of her Thursday evening D&D group. She'd trusted him to roll his own character sheet without oversight, and a few months into the campaign she'd noticed a problem. He was using metamagic feats as a level 4 wizard. The way these feats worked, the spells that he was using would have needed to be in much higher spell slots than he had access to. "You told me that you'd read and understood the feat descriptions when rolling [Wizard]. So either you lied to me then, or you've been cheating for the whole campaign. Which is it?"

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BizzarduousTask@reddit

What was his answer??

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AlaskanDruid@reddit

I always hate cliff hangers. If someone won't tell the whole story, they shouldn't start.. ugh!

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E-M0-5HiN@reddit

I know, right. Reminds me of this one time when I ….. wait ….. hold on … brb.

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commentsrnice2@reddit

Oh yeah I totally….wait…did you hear that? One sec lemme go look

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Polymathy1@reddit

It doesn't matter. Either one results in the player being yeeted.

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KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit

Yep.

He was an established TTRPGer, and knew more than the basics.

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laziestindian@reddit

Not understanding can be fixed. If you're lvl 1 but with high enough int the books tell you that you get bonus spell slots which can include spell slots above the level you are able to cast. This is confusing to a new player and while they should ask early on, its a reasonable mistake.

However, If you know enough to be using metamagic feats then theres a strong likelihood you do know how to play and are just cheating.

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fresh-dork@reddit

just to be clear - IQ is something really high like 17, so you get extra L2 slots, but you're L1, so the L2 slots are above your paygrade and just sit there, like a stale fart, until you get to a level to actually cast L2 at all.

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WildMartin429@reddit

Regardless you should always look over your players character sheets just to make sure they have it screwed anything up.

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KelemvorSparkyfox@reddit

That much was not shared with the group, which is fair. Either way, we were down a magic user for a while.

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AnitraF1632@reddit

This is exactly why I always collect character sheets at the end of each game session and hand them out at the beginning of the next one.

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Finn_Storm@reddit

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence

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Polymathy1@reddit

The issue was claiming competence and not verifying it.

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gl1tch3t2@reddit

Looks like she gave him the choice of which of those he was.

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Techn0ght@reddit

I had a user doing this at the company I was working at a couple of years after this. I was the Tech Manager but I had no power over the users, so I brought over HR to witness me telling her to stop doing it, told HR it was costing the company money. User refused to comply. HR took care of the problem.

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SomeOtherPaul@reddit

I have trouble understanding why someone would do that. Were they just not wanting to do any work that day and trying to make it look like hardware failure?

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fresh-dork@reddit

people are stupid and obstinate and sometimes think that anything they don't agree with the reasons for isn't that important. so you make it an HR problem because a technical solution to a people problem is sinful

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Techn0ght@reddit

Me either. I had another user in a call center that would claim a problem on her computer, reboot it, then report it to get approval for her time. When I told her I needed her to leave it running so I could find the problem, and I'd approve the downtime, she kept doing it, so I called her on it in front of the big honcho. The problem went away.

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boildkitty@reddit

That's where i thought it was going!

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shastadakota@reddit

She probably had a thing for you and knew you would come back if she "lost" the terminator again.

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muusandskwirrel@reddit

Believe it or not, women are driven by more than just their frothing loins.

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TxDuctTape@reddit

Fucking Thinnet. Got called over to Facilities Guy's Clubhouse. They had remodeled the office (opened/moved walls) and rerouted the coax without telling us. I traced all the lines, checked terminators all looked okay. This was before we had a decent tester. I was about to start replacing connectors when I was looking at the open walls and noticed a segment a fractional shade darker than the adjoining segment. Read the cable to find out it was RG57(?) instead of RG58. While they were rerouting, they had come up short and extended with TV coax. Caused enough interference to interrupt the network.

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st33p@reddit

Probably was RG59, which has an impedance of 75 Ohms and often used for TVs. In many RF applications it will work ok if you don't have RG58. In this application, however, it was obviously completely inappropriate.

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TxDuctTape@reddit

That was our thoughts. The mixture of the 2 was causing the issue (which I can't remember; speed? connectivity?).

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st33p@reddit

My guess is the impedance mismatch was probably enough to throw off the clock frequency, putting the network out of sync.

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Prestigious_Wall529@reddit

In a neighbouring town back in the day an electrician requiring an office took it upon himself to use TV coax instead of the inplace 50 Ohm cable.

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PracticalComplex@reddit

Classic.

One of those things you could never get away with nowadays - both from a “people can look it up on their phone” perspective and a “likely to cause a major situation at a school due to someone thinking there was an ether leak and no one using common sense”

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Deblebsgonnagetyou@reddit

Lol you think people look stuff up on their phones? If people were able to find and understand information on a search engine half the posts in this subreddit would never have happened.

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OrthosDeli@reddit

Imagine an entire situation caused by a user "confirming" this because ChatGPT told them it's real.

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Xeliicious@reddit

Funnily enough, once this post gets trawled by the many LLMs out there, it really will start telling people that there is ether in Ethernet cables.

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tinselsnips@reddit

TBF this also wouldn't happen nowadays because unplugging an empty RJ-45 plug from the back of a PC wouldn't take down the network :P

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deeseearr@reddit

But plugging the free end back into the switch can.

Yes, I know, it won't take down a _good_ network. And it certainly wouldn't take down _your_ network, because you're far too smart for that. But you'd be surprised at how many networks still don't have any way of dealing with loops.

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neddie_nardle@reddit

I'm surprised that the science-denial/anti-vaxx morons haven't got hold of the "ether in ethernet is dangerous" thing yet. Give 'em time, of course. Especially now it's on Reddit, so it must be true...

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st33p@reddit

It's how the administration will make wired networking illegal. They'll convince the gullible that it's dangerous and should be banned. Then, all of a sudden the only legal network equipment for the general public to own and use will be wireless... which makes mass surveillance a lot easier.

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VexingRaven@reddit

a “people can look it up on their phone” perspective

If people actually bothered to look shit up, I wouldn't see nearly as much of the stupid shit I see every day. Nah, these days they'd make a TikTok about how they just learned how dangerous Ethernet is urging everyone to throw away their Ethernet and it would spread across TikTok and Facebook like wildfire.

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gammalsvenska@reddit

The ability to look stuff up on their phones does not imply that they bother. Most people don't.

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PracticalComplex@reddit

Very true!

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desertdilbert@reddit

Way back in the day I had a few (very expensive at the time!) 1Mbit NE1000 Novell Coax NIC's, pullouts from somewhere.

I was reading the README file on my stack of floppys that held the newly released "Doom" and saw a reference a "Multiplayer mode".

After probably 6 hours of reading, research (The internet wasn't very good then) and fiddling around I managed to get a IPX/SPX stack working and we were able to connect to each other. It probably crashed or disconnected more then it played but that was such a blast! Have never gone back to single player games since.

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cr0100@reddit

I remember bringing coax cable and connectors to a friend's house so that we could set up our PCs all in the same room, hook up with just the IPX stack (all you needed), and do multi-player DOOM. That was my one-and-only LAN party of my life. At 60, I don't see myself doing another one any time soon.

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desertdilbert@reddit

I organized and went to many LAN parties over the years. Once broadband became ubiquitous they started falling off but we still do it once or twice a year. It's a social thing. We get to yell at each other across the room ("Friendly Fire! That was me you just fragged!"), eat junk food and generally enjoy ourselves with no distractions.

Our main go-to's right now are Team Fortress or Counter-Strike. Duke Nukem Forever is not as great as DN3D was but it's still good. The one I really miss is Descent. You should absolutely organize a LAN party! We usually have 8-12 people at ours.

In this one there were over 8 PC's scattered throughout my house. Power management was a thing!

https://imgur.com/a/9NOlEA6

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syntaxerror53@reddit

It was Unreal Tournament for us (colleague setup a server with spare PC), but on dial-up (could have been ADSL, but can't remember), after work for about an hour or so. Fun times.

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cr0100@reddit

I love this photo! The huge monitors... wow. Takes me back.

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ThunderDwn@reddit

Ahhh, the good old NE1000! That takes me back.

I was working in corporate back then, and we did a massive installation (think 8 floors, 250 PC's per floor) in a brand new office building - which promptly sat empty for 9 months because of union issues. We couldn't move on to our next job until the site was signed off and people mover in.

We had 8 floors of PC's to play with. My team used to pick a different floor each day and sit around it - a good 25m apart - and play Doom deathmatch for 7 hours (lunch break, of course!).

These PC's were state of the art for the day - 486/33 processor, 4 meg RAM, 100 meg hard drive - and we just used them for games.

For 9 months.

It was glorious.

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ImDoneForToday2019@reddit

Thank the gods she didn't unplug the token ring! Those rings are a real pain to find once they fall out.

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Fixes_Computers@reddit

The ring stayed put. It was the token which would fall out and roll under a desk.

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Intelligent_Law_5614@reddit

Just look in the lava pool inside Mount Doom. That's where they usually end up being thrown away... good riddance, actually.

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Prestigious_Wall529@reddit

The hermaphroditic connector was hell.

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clrlmiller@reddit

Ah, the olden days of 10-Base2. I remember them with a realization that not paying for an Ethernet Hub (there were NO switches back then) also had it's own costs in time and mental health.

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Intelligent_Law_5614@reddit

Indeed. There was that Monday when I came in, and found the entire startup in a risk because several of the engineers were having NFS timeouts trying to access the server, while others were OK.

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Intelligent_Law_5614@reddit

Turned out that on Saturday, somebody had added a new workstation to the net, and pushed the total length of the coax connections over the 10Base2 limit. Fortunately I had a surplus 2-port bridge at home and was able to properly partition the network into two shorter segments and get use back on the air.

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SeanBZA@reddit

I just added the spare network card into the mix, by enabling the termination on it, and plugging the cable in direct instead of by a T, and the same for the card next to it, and then updated the config to allow both 3Com cards to be enabled. Later on a third one, so, to be able to tell the networks apart they got labels of Curly Larry and Mo. mo was the shortest, only a single cable straight to the MD office, and utilisation of around 0.00%.

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anubisviech@reddit

I remember terminators. Had those in our home LAN until \~2000. We didn't feel like pulling new wires and there were already spare sattelite wired, so we got adapters and used those.

Internet wasn't fast enough for it to matter yet and everything else could be transfered with CDs.

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Ephemeral-Comments@reddit

Believe it or not, here in the Colonies it is still used. Frontier Fiber (and probably others) use MOCA adapters to terminate their GPON and route the network to a patch panel in the master bedroom.

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Liquid_Hate_Train@reddit

I knew I’d heard this story before.
https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/wqd96g/the_joys_of_ethernet/

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tubegeek@reddit

1988 -> Radio Shack. Not no more, sadly.

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shastadakota@reddit

Yes, it was convenient when you needed something right now. A cable, a resistor, a fuse, they had something that would work and get you outta there.

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daschande@reddit

Only after you give them your name and address for junk mail! I always wanted the giant tome of the radio shack catalog, but only got junk mail to sign up for a beeper.

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aspiegrrrl@reddit

I used to give them other people's names and addresses.

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jasondbk@reddit (OP)

I still use a land line phone number for some things. I disconnected the number from my account 20 years ago but still use it.

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aspiegrrrl@reddit

I still have one (included with my Internet service.) It's the number on my voter registration, and the phone has an anti-robocall device on it.

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tubegeek@reddit

I found a package of RJ45 ends at a local hardware store that saved me some aggravation recently. Got 6 for the price of 50 but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

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ThunderDwn@reddit

I used to tell them not to take the terminators off because the packets would come out really fast and might hit them in the face and hurt them. or worse.

Worst case scenario I ever had required me to epoxy the terminator in place because not matter what I did, the dumb arse using the desk always, always disconnected it at some point during the day - which took down the entire 20+ PC cable run.

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bitfxxker@reddit

To this day on she warns other people for ethernet cables.

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MikeSchwab63@reddit

Yep. Installed LanWare 1.0 (NetWare 4.0 personal version among two 386 machines.

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Therealmagicwands@reddit

Best ever retort.

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TFTP69@reddit

BNC terminators is what actually got me into opening my own computer store. I was a teen setting up a network for someone, and some how was missing 1 terminator. I stopped by a local computer shop and asked, and first they stared at me blankly, then were like oh yeah, I think we have one.

They brought out a jumbled box of cables, pulled out a terminator that literally was RUSTY and asked is this what you need? I was like sure, is, how much? (thinking they'd see me as a kid and be like eh, have it. Or maybe like $2 or something)

And was told $19!!! Right then and there I decided I was going to open a computer shop and have everything you possibly could need for your computer locally.

So I did, eventually I had a couple hundred thousand in inventory, and I catered to all retail customers, but also sold wholesale to any resellers, consultants or other shops as well.

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Prestigious_Wall529@reddit

Used a 47 Ohm resistor from a motorfactors as a stopgap.

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AlaskanDruid@reddit

I like this. Do you still run the shop?

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TFTP69@reddit

Ran for 25 years, "retired" and now work in corporate environment so I can build up a 401k. The shop I opened on my 18th birthday, the first moment they'd give me business license.

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willstr1@reddit

An important question, when you left for RadioShack to pick up the terminator did you say "I'll be back" in your best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice?

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giantrons@reddit

Ahhh, the good old days…..

Had a site wired for that, all daisy chained. Years go by and the site office manager who knew nothing about tech decided to design his new state of the art fiber network. Fiber was just coming out. He calls us in after setting it all up today there’s something wrong with our gear, it won’t connect to the network.

I do some digging and end up in the network closet. All just a bunch of fibers hanging from the rack, connected to each other. No switch. No router.

I ask Mr Office Manager where’s the switch? He says “what switch?”, “just daisy chained them”.

The guy was a jerk most times so I loved telling him that’s not how fiber works. You need a switch. He looks it up and realizes he screwed up. Not only did the fibers need to be rerouted but the cost of a fiber switch back then was outrageous. He hadn’t budgeted for that. So it stayed as a coax network for close to a year until he could get the funds to get a switch and reroute cables.

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JoeDonFan@reddit

Holy mackerel that was genius.

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Bcwar@reddit

You sir are my kinda petty. Keep the users thinking 🤟😈🤟

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itenginerd@reddit

man, I miss BNC (as a malicious teen, that is, not ever once as an admin). Used to be kinda fun to wiggle the cable off your Sparc station not enough so that you could tell, but just enough that it dropped connection for the whole set of machines on the line.

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CoderJoe1@reddit

Time to put her desk phone in a bag while they clean the phone lines by blowing air through them.