Re: Closest I've had to that ....
I once traced a bunch of network cables, trying to work out a) what they did, b) whether they were the culprit in some networked PCs that could no longer connect.
I literally traced them by hand, back under floors, through cellars, up stairs, through roofs, into conduit, down corridors, etc. and ended up the other end. But still... dead cables.
Opened up a bunch of conduit that was 10+ years old, and had been painted over every year since (so you could date it by the strata/colour of the paint. Inside one stretch of conduit, 10 cables go in, 10 cables come out. Opened up every inch of the conduit to see if the cable was pinched.
Not pinched. Cut. Not just cut, but cut, then pulled 6 feet apart. Then left in the conduit like that.
One end, numbered cable in a bunch. 500m away, same-numbered cables in a bunch. In between, en-route, 6 foot gap of sliced cable for no reason whatsoever.
But, obviously, that couldn't be the reason that the networking had gone down recently. It had just been like that for years and someone was too lazy to label the cables, remove them, or cut the ends off to let people know.
No, the office in question was down because the same networking guy had put a 10Mbps 5port network hub under the incredibly expensive parquet flooring, powered from a Heath Robinson power point under the same flooring, then wired it through a radiator cover to make it look like the cables were structural when in fact they just came from an old hub hidden under a floor that you could not take apart.
Obviously one day the power arrangements changed, and the office went offline. Then you get the "why can't you just put it all back online instantly now that you know the problem?" Because I have a bit of professional pride and I'm not going to just replicate that situation with a Gigabit switch even if I could. So we had to get cabling contractors in to wire it all in properly - without lifting the floor.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
