this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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So that's why a 2 systems were getting crappy speeds. Yes, 2. It had been used only to split a single drop from another switch between two systems.

New drop, happy clients.

Some stuff here is museum material.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I've used one of those before!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I once found a old switch in a wall

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

When you tug the unusually weighted cable and you hear metal scraping in the wall 10 metres away 😬

Hope it wasn't too much of an arse to fish out. Or did you let sleeping switches lie? :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That thing isn't even old. I had a similar situation occur recently. I found a 10meg 3com hub two months ago. Not 10/100 but 10meg. Not a switch but a hub. It was in a closet between two fairly new switches. I just chucked it not thinking it might be a conversation piece. We replaced the line with a 50m fiber run. We also replaced several drops since they were thirty years old. The customer was really happy with how fast things are now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This one must be about 15 at least. Pre-dates me and I've been there for 13. Still functional so I'm at loathe to just sling it. Not fond of doing drops in such wonderful weather, in a building that is basically a dusty hot tin can. Wanted to do it properly though.

Just happy that on this side it's my direct employer and only one site. I'll have to do some more digging - I'm certain we have kit around even more legacy than this. The CNC lathe PC is y2k compliant....

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At least the lathe isn't running punch tape.

Don't upgrade or mess with the control. Disconnect from the network if it's on it. It should have RS-232. Throw a Pi or other SBC that does serial and a 12V level shifter; use that to feed it programs.

Also, make an image of the hard drive if it has one and start looking for a spare drive on ebay.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I've got it covered :) - whole duplicate set of hardware & drive image. Recapped the board last year & replaced PSU too.

I won't touch the DOS software it uses to actually run the plant, the lads can have at that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

That 3com hub was new in the late 90's

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Was it at least taped to the rack and/or wall?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I once found one in a network closet that had the entire bundle of cables going into it tied in a knot and was just hanging from the ceiling like that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was troubleshooting why an upgrade from 10Mb Cards to 100Mb cards wasn’t working for a group of users. Tracing the lines and come to find out the existing lines were Cat-3…. that suddenly got splice in to a 50-pair telco bundle at a 66 block. Worked perfectly fine for 10Mb, not so much for anything faster.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

We had a section of comptuers that would not properly image. Come to find out that there were actual cat 3 cables mixed in randomly across the floor. That was the year that I bought several hundred new ethernet cables and we replaced every last one of them to be sure.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Pretty sure my friend got one of those second hand for lan parties he hosted in highschool. That was was more than 20 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

It's going straight in the "if you're looking in here, you must be desperate" spares cupboard.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Woah. Haven't seen one of those for like 25 years. I used to bring one to LAN parties.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

CS1.6, beige boxes, CRTs and sweat. A different time.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (5 children)

As someone who grew up with 10Base2 and 10BaseT, and thought 100Mbps was amazing - it still surprises me every time I'm reminded how slow it is now. I buried a cat6 cable out to my wife's studio and due to (I assume) some grounding issues it only syncs at 100Mbps - it works for general browsing etc., but every time we try to move some data it's arggghhh.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

What type of cable did you use? Water could have seeped into which cause a bunch of weird issue because the resistance on the wires goes all wonky. I’m not sure if you have access to a cable certified like a Fluke, but if you do I would use that to test and it will most likely tell you your issue. I highly doubt it’s a grounding issue because you’d issues like that in large buildings where the power is on different phases or technical power.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Fast ethernet ain’t so fast these days

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Shouldn’t be a grounding issue as you said that you buried it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Can't find an emoji holding its side and laughing. Just pretend.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It's a 200' cable and the buildings each have their own connection to the power company. I suspect that the earth potential of the two buildings is quite different - I just have not figured out a way to measure it yet and not sure if there's anything I can do to fix it even if I do confirm it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Pull a copper wire from one ground to the other?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

That shouldn't be a problem unless you're using grounded shielded cable, in which case you should make sure the shield ground is only connected at one end.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Potentially I might know a Gaia that can help.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The phone lines repurposed as ethernet in my parents’ house also only do 100 Mb/s. I concur, so painful. I want to put a storage server there but no matter where it’s limited by awful speeds. It also means getting faster internet would be useless because it would be limited by these wires.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wonder if it would have been the same cost to do an outdoor fiber run.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Probably not, the costs were essentially just sticking ethernet ports on the walls next to the phone ports and rewiring the existing wires to those ports. And back when this was done (whenever we got DSL, around 2005 maybe?) fiber tech was probably prohibitively expensive. I haven’t looked up how much fiber modems cost but it would probably be more expensive even today.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I've worked at places where we repurposed old CAT3 cables for network connecting printers, desk phones, environmental sensors, etc. Rare occasions where 10Mbps works just fine. Using that to connect a PC would suck.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Buy a cheap unifi ptp bridge on ebay, speeds are fantastic and you can even put an AP at the other end of it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

I already have a pair of Ubiquiti airMax GigaBeams left over from a different project and agree - they perform incredibly well. I didn't even bother aligning mine as they did 800Mbit/s just pointed in the right general direction. A trench was being dug to the studio for another reason and cable is relatively cheap so I figured I'd drop one in. Hasn't turned out as well as I hoped. I will setup the GigaBeams one day - but the cable does occasionally sync at 1Gbps and I'm hoping that one day it just stays there :-)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It was fast for it's time.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

It was fast enough up until today even!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm imagining 2 server 2008 boxes with prod DB and reporting db?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Air gapped, right?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Factory setting (says it all really).

A CAD PC and a standard client used by the QC guy.

Server 08 isn't a distant memory here though 😬

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

One of our clients 2 drafters were moaning earlier this month because their print jobs were taking forever to send. They were both on a 5 port 10/100 of similar vintage. Good times.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I don't see the issue here, it says Fast Internet Switch. Why would it lie like that?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Fast Ethernet was great before gigabit

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Look, that's 10 times as fast as it could have been!