Trust The Tools in Life After 60
- May 14, 2020, 9:22 a.m.
- |
- Public
Every now and then I am called upon to find a lost or dead line in a network switch. And for that purpose, I purchased a relatively expensive piece of testing equipment. When I first got it I trusted it like gold. Never failed me, never let me down. Till today.
The call came in that the internet had been lost in the building. Post-haste I make my way to the network closet to survey the situation. Nothing really sticks out except for a fan warning light. So I move to the computers to see if the issue could be there. A red X indicates to me the cat5 cable is unplugged. So check the cat5 is the nest step. It is connected so back to the switch. The only lights that are blinking are the ones going to separate switches in the building. Just to eliminate them I run a quick line check and there check out fine.
I have finally decided the only problem is the main switch. I replace the bad switch with one I know to be good and presto, nothing! I do have intra-net, but no internet. Time to check the main cable line between buildings. The only problem, none of the cat5 cables are labeled.
Bring out the trusty tester and track them down. The tester doesn’t find the mainline. 3 hours later I still had not found the main cable. So I did what any self-respecting tech would do. I left. After sleeping on it, I determined the best course of action was to return and trace each line separately. There are six lines not connecting so I check them, locate them, and label them! Down to the last wire, it has to be the main cable, nothing left. Put the test on it and bam, it doesn’t read. What the heck? It has to be the last cable, I mean I have check all the others and know where they go. Okay, maybe the tester failed.
And then it hit me. The lights came on in my feeble brain and I noticed two other lines lying on the floor. Yes, you guessed it my tester was right all along. I just didn’t trust the tool to do its job. Plugged the other cables in and the internet, she is a working again.
Rule number one: Trust Your Tools
SelfPartnered ⋅ May 18, 2020
Been an IT for 13 years man.. yes trust your tools, especially fluke line testers, they make our life ten times easier and jobs faster. a couple other things i've learned over the years:
1. Always get the full story from the user, and hopefully they tell it to you, so you can actually diagnose the issue better, even if they don't want to tell you their embarrassing details about what they were doing or downloading during the outage.
2. It's almost always an update/reboot or physical issue.