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Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

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Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#71

A newly hired employee had the strangest problem with his ethernet when he started. Whenever he plugged in ethernet it would only give him 10mbps. But if he unplugged and replugged it in. It'd switch over to 1000. What was more strange. On off. Router or hardware on off. Reboot. Nothing would switch it over to higher speed. We tested it a dozen times. But if you plug it in. Unplug then plug in a 2nd time. Viola 1gbps…

Intels' IEGBE drivers used to have a bug that would cause exactly this problem. (I know, because I found the bug and fixed it once, years ago..)

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#72
post #65

Around 2000: a colleague told me about his slow PC, rattling noises, random crashes. i did what any responsible workmate would do: told him to call IT support, I'm a web-designer (well actually I was a frontend, backend developer, database guy and project manager but devision of labor in webdevelopment didn't happen yet so my job title was webdesigner, anyway...)! 5 weeks of various visits by the IT support later, in…

I doubt fridge magnets would have anything to do with problems in a PC, they would need to be about 100x stronger than that to have any sort of impact

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#73
post #72
post #65

Around 2000: a colleague told me about his slow PC, rattling noises, random crashes. i did what any responsible workmate would do: told him to call IT support, I'm a web-designer (well actually I was a frontend, backend developer, database guy and project manager but devision of labor in webdevelopment didn't happen yet so my job title was webdesigner, anyway...)! 5 weeks of various visits by the IT support later, in…

I doubt fridge magnets would have anything to do with problems in a PC, they would need to be about 100x stronger than that to have any sort of impact

It's possible they were blocking all the vents and causing airflow issues?

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#74
post #72
post #65

Around 2000: a colleague told me about his slow PC, rattling noises, random crashes. i did what any responsible workmate would do: told him to call IT support, I'm a web-designer (well actually I was a frontend, backend developer, database guy and project manager but devision of labor in webdevelopment didn't happen yet so my job title was webdesigner, anyway...)! 5 weeks of various visits by the IT support later, in…

I doubt fridge magnets would have anything to do with problems in a PC, they would need to be about 100x stronger than that to have any sort of impact

It was the beginning 00 years with, so old school magnetic hard drives and other old school hardware.

Most of all it was reproduceable. With magnets ... slower, slower, rattling, slower ... 1, 2, 3 days later crash.

Without: gone.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#75
post #53

Well my best-worst debugging story concerns a friend's work based email account and Microsoft Outlook (in 2012). Occasionally it would fail to connect to send email to the server, just randomly. Obvious troubleshooting ensued, web traffic worked, could ping the email server, could connect with telnet and read email that way; Thunderbird worked. Created a new account, that would work for a while and then fail again. L…

Sounds like someone forgot to call this function, and maybe most of the systems were big-endian, so it didn't matter, but one was little-endian: https://linux.die.net/man/3/ntohl

Endianness was the first thing I thought of as well. Or maybe one component of the stack thought that IP addresses are char[4] while another thought they're u32_t, though you'd expect that to be caught by the typechecker.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#76
post #24

Since we're all sharing wacky debugging stories.... I had a user of an audio streaming product who suffered from random disconnects. He could only stream for about five minutes before it quit. But, and this was the crazy part, the problem only happened when streaming rock and roll. Classical music worked fine. After many weeks going back and forth, I tracked it down to a misconfiguration on his network interface. The…

I'm assuming this is due to the lower average signal level of symphonic recordings? Rock music is mastered closer to 0db due to the well-publicized loudness war.

Obviously, this doesn't affect bandwidth in uncompressed audio, where every sample contains every bit, so filesize = bit-depth * sample-rate(hz) * T(seconds). But in compressed audio, average signal level can make a significant difference in filesize/bandwidth.

(Who would have thought a network would be a casualty of the loudness war... harhar)

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#78
post #54
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the kind of bug which seems ridiculous as a bug report, but turns out to be true. Like the "OpenOffice.org won’t print on Tuesdays" bug, or the bug which crashed the computer when the general visited. Or the one when the server went down whenever a certain guy had a support ticket.

Do you have a link for the one with the general visiting? Sadly a google search just gave stories of military officers in plan crashes.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find it anymore.

It was in a military facility in the seventies, and always when the general visited the computers crashed. This happened too often to be a demonstration effect, it turned out to be the metal in the generals shoes interfering with the electronics.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#79
post #70
post #24

Since we're all sharing wacky debugging stories.... I had a user of an audio streaming product who suffered from random disconnects. He could only stream for about five minutes before it quit. But, and this was the crazy part, the problem only happened when streaming rock and roll. Classical music worked fine. After many weeks going back and forth, I tracked it down to a misconfiguration on his network interface. The…

Rock music has more information (in Shannon's sense) than classical music.

Yeah, I imagine all those distortion and amp units introduce a lot of fairly loud random noise.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#80

A newly hired employee had the strangest problem with his ethernet when he started. Whenever he plugged in ethernet it would only give him 10mbps. But if he unplugged and replugged it in. It'd switch over to 1000. What was more strange. On off. Router or hardware on off. Reboot. Nothing would switch it over to higher speed. We tested it a dozen times. But if you plug it in. Unplug then plug in a 2nd time. Viola 1gbps…

Intels' IEGBE drivers used to have a bug that would cause exactly this problem. (I know, because I found the bug and fixed it once, years ago..)

Disabling autonegotiation and forcing 1Gbps full-duplex on the NIC might solve it, too.
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