Oh God, the stupidity!

[Nevon]

Every night around midnight, my wireless connection would drop every now and then. It had been happening ever since we installed the new wireless router, but I could not seem to be able to figure out why it kept happening. According to our ISP, they weren't conducting tests or whatever in the middle of the night - so there shouldn't be any problems. I tried resetting the router and fiddling around with different settings, and sure enough, it worked - until midnight. At first I thought that it might be some weird issue with WPA2 and Ubuntu, but soon I realized that my brother was having the same problem, and he runs Vista.

It felt like I had tried everything, and I was about ready to give up. Then I just happened to poke the router out of frustration... And I saw what was wrong.

One of the cables that connect to the router had somehow been damaged, so whenever it was moved it stopped working. Why did it happen every night around midnight? Because the router is propped up on my brother's window shelf, and every night he would close the curtains and accidentally move the router.

Sometimes I tend to look at the more complex solutions before even investigating the obvious ones...

[powell]

Nice, thanks all I can say, I've never done something like that before

[Sealbhach]

That's funny. I've got a little piece of a matchstick in my router, after hours of calls to tech support I discovered a badly fitting connection and the easiest solution was to jam a match into the connection to tighten up the connection.


.

[Nevon]

That's funny. I've got a little piece of a matchstick in my router, after hours of calls to tech support I discovered a badly fitting connection and the easiest solution was to jam a match into the connection to tighten up the connection.


.

A piece of scotch tape solved it for me. :P

[3rdalbum]

I heard of a university where their network kept going down around lunchtime. They EVENTUALLY found that squirrels had eaten through the shielding in some of the cables that just happened to pass through a staff lunch-room, and just happened to pass right behind the microwave in the lunch-room! Goodness knows how squirrels got into the room, or how they found out it was squirrels and not rats, but they used some tougher shielding and never had the problem again.

In a similar vein, I used to attend a university where the network would start to go very slowly at pretty much the same times every week. And it always went slowly during my video editing class. One day I was looking at the Adobe Premiere settings and found that the "scratch" (temporary) video storage was set to the main server rather than to the local hard disk. 30 people rendering video to the network server simultaneously. I never experienced much slowdown during that class after that... I changed the scratch to the local hard disk!

[uberdonkey5]

he he.I used to have a playstation and my guinea pigs (free range in the house,and toilet trained of course) nibbled the wires. Occasionally Lara Croft or Colin McCray would disappear from my TV screen and I'd have to wobble the wires to get the game back on.

[frrobert]

That reminds me of an old story. I worked at a factory where I was a chemist and eventually was assigned to be Network admin to an newly installed network in the plant circa 1991.

There was one segment of the network that would go down everyday at 3:30 PM but worked fine during the day. I tried all kinds of things and finally went about tracing the actual cables and I found that the electricians had strapped the network cable to a 440 3 phase conduit. The conduit ran to a machine that was only used on 2nd shift, so during the day the conduit was not energized so the network did not have a problem. Then about 3:30 everyday they would fire up the machine for second shift and the segment would go down.

[Tomosaur]

There's a story (not mine) floating around about these guys who had this recurring problem where their server would go down every night at a certain time. They had no idea what the problem was. They tried every avenue they could think of - looking for bugs in their code, checking for attacks and vulnerabilities etc.

One night they'd all had enough so they went into the server room and tried to diagnose the problem first hand - it must be a hardware issue, surely! While they're sitting at a server terminal, they watch, dumbstruck, as a cleaner walks in to the room, bends down, unplugs the server from the power socket and plugs in her vacuum cleaner.