Ghosts are pulling out the network cords, man

Posted by CeC-P@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 18 comments

Just kidding. MSP here and it turns out it was actually the fact that the two main switches are under the secretary's desk, because duh, where else would you put them? And she runs a space heater if it's below 85F in there. Turns out snagless CAT6 housing is also known as heat shrink tubing and it will squeeze the plug and eject the Ethernet cable on its own, if hot enough for long enough.

Yes, we have told her it's not ideal to do that. No, she doesn't care.

I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

[-]

Hot-Comfort8839@reddit

Those space heaters will blow your electrical circuit, and cause fires. They're bad juju across the board man.

[-]

silesiant@reddit

instead, use the glue to secure the cables!

[-]

SukkerFri@reddit

This is perfect example of why we have best practices in IT 🤣 And this is not one of those practices.

I guess you need new cables, to mitigate this issue or hot glue it all together! This is the way.

[-]

Opposite_Bag_7434@reddit

But hot glue is not a best practice

[-]

PURRING_SILENCER@reddit

Which one is cheaper? Management will only approve the cheapest option.

What if we just leave it be and get angry at IT when they can't fix it?

[-]

maxsmoke105@reddit

Man, space heaters are the bane of network connections.

Back in the old days of coax ethernet I had a customer that decided to save money by buying 25/50/100 ft pre-made cables rather than have me custom cable to office. Everything ran fine for about 6 weeks then suddenly everyday at 9:00 the network would go down. Communication would come back but intermittently would die again.

Of course when I went out everything was fine. After working through a week's schedule I was able to get them in a morning on site slot. I went straight there, arriving at 8:30. Everything's fine. 9:02 everything shuts down.

The good news is that I was at the front door chatting with the receptionist so I had a great view of one of the ladies coming in, setting her stuff down and then watched as she flipped on the power strip and everyone simultaneously crying about dropped network connections.

She had a 100ft coil of coax under her desk with one of those old school resistance style space heaters sitting right on top of it. She'd been out on maternity leave so it worked while she was out. Every time the heat cut on the RF noise killed the network.

[-]

ObiLAN-@reddit

I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

Don't wirry dude, this just means you can start huffing break cleaner instead. Happy Monday!

[-]

TheRuffRaccoon@reddit

I work for a school district, and this happened years ago but our internet circuit that ran the entire school district was in a break room at our district office behind a coke machine. Someone had the bright idea to unplug it and plug up a paper shredder for them to use. Luckily, when we moved to a new district office, we were able to get them to give us our own closet for our equipment..

[-]

ender_grimm@reddit

I had that same issue at a school district but that they combined a break room and IDF. During state testing they would bring in 6-12 crocpots and put them on the same breaker until it tripped... and then did the same thing again the next year.

[-]

Afraid_Baseball_3962@reddit

I chuckled at the glue sniffing reference. I should watch that again.

[-]

wintermute023@reddit

At least you got a good story out of it.

[-]

Commercial_Growth343@reddit

Your building might have a policy regarding space heaters. It would be a shame if someone were to check if that was the case and maybe report this person to the building.

[-]

awkwardnetadmin@reddit

Depending upon the location the space heater may be against policy. Having a switch under a person's desk though is bad practice in general and cringe anybody put one there. Try to always have switches in some type of IDF or worst case scenario a small rack cabinet that careless users can't accidentally cause cables to come out.

[-]

CeC-P@reddit (OP)

We only had snagless so I cut the housing off the replacements.

[-]

UMustBeNooHere@reddit

Jesus. Who pays that bill? Time to talk them about that nonsense.