Posted on 2003-11-18 00:14:19, modified on 2006-01-09 16:29:21
Tags: Networking
What started as two people on level 14 of the St James Hall building who couldn't work anymore at the end was nothing less than a whole floor who didn't have internet access.
Monday late in the afternoon I was experimenting with a guy from C. (the telephone company used by BarNet) to get an Voice over IP card working. Didn't work, at the end he pulled out all cables from the PBAX towards the router and went home.
At that same moment SJH level 14 disappeared from the network and nobody informed us that the internet didn't work again (this was 16:22)
The next morning, because nobody had informed us, it still was gone from the network. Interestingly enough, two people complained at our standby phone saying that their internet didn't work. A quick scan showed their IP addresses as 169.254.x.x, meaning: no answer from the DHCP server. Big mistery, I hadn't changed anything in the DHCP configuration for that subnet last night.
Michael had to go to court, so I jumped on the train to the SJH building and started to look what was actually happening. No answer from the DHCP server, no packets over the line, nothing. Two more people came to me saying that their internet didn't work. This was strange, suddenly the whole floor seemed to be out!
Level 13 and level 14 of the SJH building are on the same IP subnet, so why could one work and one not? The lights at the switch were on. Except for one: the one to the switch/router. Back on level 13 my biggest fears got confirmed: The interface towards level 14 didn't have a network cable in it. And the cable which came from level 14 was plugged in into a port on the switch on level 13.
Quickly plugging them back solved the problem. According to C., the company who had done work the day before in that room, they hadn't touched that cable. Gnomes. Network gnomes. Or people who don't want to say they screwed it up.
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