I apologize in advance to the long story. As if the universe just had to throw a wrench in my joy of not having to show up to work until 10am, I got a call as I took the first sip of coffee this morning that one of our clinics was having issues. Apparently the front office staff and some of the dental lab computers were offline. A few weeks ago we had a switch fail and I assumed it had happened again. The site has one 24 port Cisco 2960 and a 24 port unmanaged D-Link. These D-Link switches are total junk. I'd already swapped the D-Link once with a spare I had laying around. I grabbed another switch and headed 30 miles to assess the issue. Everything on the 2960 was working fine. Everything on the D-Link was down. After a few tests with my LinkRunner(LR) I just switched it out. Problem still existed. Finally I unplugged everything except the cable between the switches, which I had already tested. I refreshed my LR's test function as I plugged each cable in one by one. I finally identified the problematic cable. I plug the cable in my LR. The lights start flashing non-stop, like it thinks it's connected to a switch. Assuming someone had attempted to bring a wireless AP or something to work, I place the LR in tone mode and head around looking for the culprit. That location predates me so there is no mapping of ports/plates/patches/etc. After about 30 minutes of searching my probe goes off as I walk by the credit card machine. I verified that reconnecting the machine to my unmanaged switch knocked everything offline. A reboot of the cc machine resolved the issue. I have no idea what that thing was doing, but basically ruined my morning. Luckily I have a brand new one in a box that's being sent over tomorrow. I'm impatiently waiting for my TechSoup approval so I can get the last of my unmanaged switches replaced.
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