Hmm, Ethernet card acting squirrely, I guess I will vacuum out the dust bunnies in the computer case.

[ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org]

Hmm, Ethernet card acting squirrely, I guess I will vacuum out the dust bunnies in the computer case. #random

[ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org]

...and, everything seems happier now. (there WERE a lot of dust bunnies in there).

[crazyeddie@mastodon.social]

@ai6yr Last time I did that I had to peel a blanket of the stuff off the radiator and THEN blow it out. I've vowed to do it more often

[ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org]

@crazyeddie I think blowing it all out would ALSO be helpful.

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@ai6yr @crazyeddie

just blow it outside and away from you...

at one point, i was supporting gear in a colo run by SPRINT. not surprisingly, since SPRINT is Southern Pacific Railroad INTernational, many of their POPs were at railway yards, right on the side of the tracks.

it was just stunning how much soot electronics with fans could suck up in a colo 15ft/5m away from an active railroad track. in less than a year, we couldn't read any of the printing on the circuit boards or chips, as they were covered layer after layer of it.

[ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org]

@paul_ipv6 @crazyeddie Sprint is a railroad?!?!??!

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@ai6yr @crazyeddie

originally.

since they had right of way for all the tracks and already had poles for telegraph, they first just ran copper, then fiber for telephony along the same right of ways.

wiltel (Williams Telecom) used empty natural gas pipes filled with fiber as their entry into the telphony world.

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@ai6yr @crazyeddie

one of the best outage stories i had (well after it was over and i'd recovered) was an outage of most of southeast US for all sprint voice.

the progression of notices from sprint:

- we are having an issue with our main voice POP in the southeast
- there has apparently been a flood in our pop
- the flood caused a mud slide, resulting in 10ft/3m of mud filling our POP
- the mud slide caused a train in the station to derail and slam into our POP
- we are waiting for HAZMAT to tell us when we can get into the POP to assess the damage, since the train that derailed was carrying hazardous chemicals
- the POP is a total loss and we are waiting to hear from AT&T how quickly they can get us an entire ESS POP

ultimately, a middle eastern country who had ordered a full ESS agreed to take delayed delivery and they fedex overnighted an entire POP full of gear and pulled every sprint tech and contractor east of the mississippi in to rebuild once they'd cleared the mud and old gear out. total outage for all sprint voice in the region was 6 days. this included the federal government.

sometimes it's not that clever to use your railway right of way to deliver telephony.