Networking

The network isn’t haunted — it’s orphaned ports, stale DNS, and a firewall eating your return path. Run the checklist before you light the candles.

An inventory report swore a site had 99 access points; the ceiling said twelve, and the database had been lying the whole time.

A $30 Wi-Fi window blind decided it was the default gateway, and the whole site went dark whenever it felt like it.

You remember hauling your whole computer across town just to sit in a room and frag your friends.

Edits vanished, reads lied, and nothing in the logs was wrong — because two copies of the same app were quietly knife-fighting over the same TCP port.

A Telegram bot kept freezing on outbound calls with no error — turns out a NIC with IPv6 addresses but no working IPv6 routing was quietly killing every request.

The bastion broke every time an IP changed, so I deleted the bastion.

A wired network melting down at a customer site, traced to a pair of consumer speakers quietly braiding a layer-2 loop out of copper and mesh.

I ran a ‘harmless’ config script against a pfSense box and watched the entire firewall configuration evaporate in a single function call.