Today I came in to the office, and something fishy was going on with our network.
It intermittently just stopped working. Our database is all but unusable because the clients are crashing due to the network dropping.
The secretaries in the office started complaining that print jobs were taking a long time to print–what used to take 2 seconds to start printing now took 30-120 seconds to print.
My first thought was our network had somehow been compromised, so I opened up my sniffer to see where the extra volume of traffic was coming from.
But there wasn’t anything unusual there–there was not an exceedingly high volume of traffic.
So I started looking at our hardware, and I restarted all three network appliances we have (for good measure), and no change.
So finally, I unplugged literally everything from the switch, taking our network to its knees (even more than it was previously). I unplugged everything except 2 computers and the DHCP server.
This meant no one could do anything. I had to kill the network. Once it was all killed, the two computers were functioning back and forth together as normal.
Slowly, one by one, I plugged things back in. One at a time I tried and tested. It’s a long process, especially when you’re testing for an intermittent issue.
Isn’t this a lot like how God has to clean us up sometimes? He has to bring up to our knees before he can start to build us back up. But I think often, we don’t want to slowly test and we get our life back up to speed–we just want what we want when we want it.
Can you relate to this?
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