There was a lab I hung out in back in college. The nature of the room and the devices that we had in there, there was 10bT, 10b2, and 10b5. Twisted pair, coax, and thick.
The someone had what was termed "the connector of evil". Apparently coax and thick had the same signal... just thick was more rigid about where you connected into it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_tap ). The connector of evil looked like a 10b5 terminator on one side and 10b2 on the other... and passed the signal between them.
When adding another computer onto the 10b2 segment, we would invariably disrupt the wave in the wire and some devices would drop off.
The trick was to have each machine ping -f one of the systems on 10bT and redirect its output to /dev/audio. If the machine was making noise, it was good. And so then we'd fiddle with different lengths of coax between the T connectors until everything was buzzing away.
Ah, I probably missed it because we had the following dialogue at the office.
<senior-sysadm> Hey bayindirh, is the log server up?
<bayindirh> *SSHs to server* Yes, it's up and running nicely.
<senior-sysadm> Where's that thing in the system room?
<bayindirh> *Scratches head* Umm, I don't know?
<senior-sysadm> Go find it, we'll upgrade it to newer HW.
<bayindirh> Uh, OK. *leaves desk to dig the system room*.
P.S.: I'm the one who installed that server physically and configured it in the first place. :D
Funny, we used to do the same with random pcs in our lab that people would setup and forget about. We used the Duke Nuken 3D theme song from when the game first loaded.
Happened to me recently when moving. Couldn't find one of my zigbee temperature sensors, but it was still reporting information diligently, so it had to be somewhere in the house. Took about 6 months before I found it.
Anticlimactic, partly unpacked moving box. I was mostly surprised it was able to re-join the mesh while being in a completely different spot, something that a lot zigbee chips struggle with.
I’m reminded of the time I dropped a Juul behind/beside a makeshift workshop table and it magnetically attached itself a foot or so below to the freestanding metal shelving unit directly next to it.
I don’t advise using Juul products for this and other reasons.
I'd love to find the contact details for this old server I used to use. It's been online continuously since 1996 and I know the first name of the guy that has it, but I don't remember his last name. Shit, the server hardware might even be mine, I don't even remember. I can't even remember if it is Linux or *BSD at this point.
