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.

What rack, haha.

Stuffed in a corner, under a load of other crap, in a warren of dust bunnies. Main rack is in an adjacent office.

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....

Pull a copper wire from one ground to the other?

Fast Ethernet was great before gigabit

I once found a old switch in a wall

Air gapped, right?

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.

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

a Gaia?

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.

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.

Potentially I might know a Gaia that can help.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 :-)

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.

Fast ethernet ain’t so fast these days

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

It was fast enough up until today even!