Once worked in a "DC" in a converted cow shed in the English countryside. Hot takes that align with your experiences:
- A key microwave link kept going down with intermittent packet errors way down in the data link layer. A short investigation discovered that a tree across the road had come into leaf, and a branch was blowing into the line of sight of the kit on our building. A step-ladder, a saw and 10 minutes later we restored connectivity
- Our main (BGP-ified) router out of the DC - no, there wasn't a redundant device - kept rebooting. A quick check showed the temp in the DC was so high, cooling so poor, that the *inlet* fan had an air temp of over 60C. We pointed some fans at it as a temporary measure.
- In a similar vein, a few weeks later the air con in another room just gave up and started spewing water over the Nortel DMS-100 (we were a dial-in ISP with our own switch). Wasn't too happy to be asked to help mop it up (thought the water could potentially be live), but what to do?
After that experience I spent time on a small, remote island where main link to the internet was a 1MB/sec link vis GS satellite (ping times > 500ms), and where the locals dialled in over a microwave phone network rated to 9600 baud, but somehow 56k modems worked... One fix I realised I needed was a Solaris box was missing a critical .so, there were no local backups or install media and so I phoned my mate back in the UK and asked him to whack up a copy on an FTP server for me to get the box back online.
And a few years after that I also got to commission a laser beam link over Manchester's Oxford Road (at the time, the busiest bus route in Europe), to link up an office to a University campus. Fun times.
It was all terrific fun, but I'm so glad I now only really do software.