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

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'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.

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

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 :-)

It's pre terminated pure copper direct burial cat6 from Amazon. I don't have access to a real tester, but my cisco switch has some built in test capability and I'm not sure I fully understand the results, but it's assessment of the cable length is pretty close and, more importantly, it shows all the pairs are the same as each other. I think that if there was some damage to the cable, it's unlikely that it would affect all the pairs in exactly the same way. I have other weird grounding issues - like 20V between neutral and ground, even though it's a new house and they're properly bonded at the service entry. I had a really old transformer on the street feeding the two buildings and the power company recently replaced it - I was disappointed when this didn't resolve all my issues.

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.

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

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.

Well, there was air in the gaps? We "volunteered" to move them onto a couple vms on server19 just so we could sleep at night.

I am yet to see load bearing cat in person. Plenty time yet though!

"In the wall" is an exaggeration. It technically was behind a massive desk that tool a group to move.

Basically in a wall. At that same place I also found a consumer router and a switch in the ceiling handling everyones traffic. It was toasty up there.