Truly bizarre network incident
Late yesterday afternoon parts of the network here at home became unavailable. Only my office and all devices connected there had issues – the rest of the house was working fine. I restarted the main router in the garage and reset the switch in the office, but nothing seemed to fix it. I was still able to get sporadic outbound connections from the devices in the office, but they could not “see” each other and inbound connections were completely broken.
I started to blame the 16-port Linksys switch, because one of those had failed on me before. This morning I was the first customer at Office Depot to get a replacement switch. Once installed in the office, I was surprised to still see the same networking issue.
So I went through all devices attached to the switch and power-cycled them one after another. When I arrived at the third server and hit the reset button on it, everybody else in the room was suddenly happy again. That server was running an older version of FreeBSD and while there was no obvious traffic coming from it (the lights on the network interface were off) it somehow managed to screw up things for everybody else.
Most unexpected hardware fault I’ve ever seen …
