As you probably noticed today, the network bug was back with a
vengeance.  My optimistic note last night was perhaps in haste,
but I was hoping for some sign of encouragement.  I should have known
better as the net doesn't care about what you think, it sometimes has
a life of its own.  However... over the course of the day... eureka!

Have you ever been in a busy airport, say Hartsfield in Atlanta, with
thousands of people inside, and those annoying pages come over the
intercom "Buzzard Airlines paging passenger Bartholemew Hassenfeffer,
please meet your party at the south terminal baggage pickup carousel
five" ?  And they keep on repeating it, over and over again, to the
whole airport population?  And thinking to yourself "He's probably
not here, give up already" ?  But it keeps on repeating, taking
precedence over the other announcements, like flight departures and gate
changes...

That is the best metaphor I can think of to describe our network
problem.  There was a PC upstairs in Hunter that had a network card that
was broken -- it was sending out data for a nonexistent target address,
and furthermore falsifying it's own address (there was no Buzzard
Airlines nor carousel five).  Our new networking equipment (switches)
are designed to keep communications one-to-one, but when
the recipient is unknown, they "page" everything connected to them
waiting on an answer.  As a result, our router was overwhelmed by
requests for the unknown party to the point of blocking out the more
important job of directing traffic.

As of ~6:00 PM tonight after isolating the problem, we have dropped
absolutely zero packets and the [campus] network appears flawless.
Special thanks to Rusty Leutz and Mike Ward for the extra time and
effort isolating and nailing this bug to the wall, and to Dr Smullen
and CECA for their permission and patience as we wreaked havoc on
their network to facilitate our investigation.  The bad network card
could have been in anyone's PC, but it happened to be one of theirs.

Those of you that have been at UTC for awhile may remember the
mysterious network problems we had about a year and a half ago which
plagued us for some time as well.  The problem was a faulty 2-meter
patch cable which I promptly tied in knots and hung over my desk.
The patch cable is now tied around the faulty network card :-)

I'm 99% certain this problem is behind us, but if not, I hope that the
Marriott will have Baked Crow as the Blue Plate Special tomorrow :-)

With that said, I'll hush.  I'm probably pushing my luck in breaking the
tenure review series for lengthy postings on a long-running thread!

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>