Kus’ Blog

This story is real, it actually happened to me and I wanted to warn anybody who reads this dead blog.

I went a couple of days to Madrid in order to do some networking tasks and try to clean the mess that our office in Madrid was suffering.

All went smooth, and the internet connection was working. I wanted to move our router to another place to leave it all clean, I needed a 5meter long ethernet cable, couldn’t find one so I grabbed a spare cable I found on the floor that was used by the telephone company to move the telephone line. It was a 4-pair cable so for me should be ok, but the pairs were untwisted and the cable wasn’t shielded, didn’t mind for me, it had 8 wires I crimped it correctly, it worked with the only load of me testing out some web pages while chatting a little, so I leave it as good.

After a couple of days without a problem, some users there started to notice that the internet connection was slow and buggy. I could manage to connect to the internal server there from Barcelona and everything seemed ok. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Users could ping each other, but some of them couldn’t access the internet. They config was OK taken through dhcp.

Errors randomly popped. I didn’t figure it out to be this fucking cable, no clue about that, from the server I was connected to, from the router I couldn’t ping the outside, like I did a week before, no config changed. It was really wierd!

Finally I ask to get a new ethernet cable for the router to the wall plug. After that all went smooth!! OMFG it was this fucking cable!

So lesson learned… kids use at least a cat5-utp cable for your nets.