Network Nasty
After working in the networking world for decades, from time to time, I come across what I like to call network nasties, that can be terrible quality hardware, corroded connectors, cables from hell etc. This page is some of those documented with photos. Enjoy...
This one, was the cause of me spending way too much time debugging a network issue, which was right out of the twilight zone. Investigations into this issue made zero sense, even the sniffer traces showed nothing.
Eventually I noticed the link light on one of the switch ports was flickering, which is basically not a good sign. So, feeling confident I removed the cable and found this nightmare.
And yes, replacing this cable was the fix, everything just started working normally. Now that’s a surprise!!
This is the worse cable corrosion issue I have ever seen, and that’s after decades working on various networks, ranging from the ancient thicknet, 10Base2, token ring etc. This one actually looks like something is trying to grow on it, maybe it’s the literal “network bug”
I have seen things like this before, but not this bad. This sort of thing can be caused by many different things, moisture or other contaminates, or in other cases different types of metals in the connectors and sockets. In this case, to me this looks like a moisture issue.