ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Voice - Data - Video Discussion cutting data lines

The hub or switch is designed to deal with that problem. If the transmit pair somehow managed to get shorted to the receive pair (that's two specific sets of wires that would need to make contact), the hub or switch would just disable the port until the problem went away. Any other pairs getting shorted simply wouldn't do anything.

Some of the IT people I deal with are "ping monkeys". They know how to ping things and that's it.

I understand the switch or the software should be able to disable this port in the software but 100' of unterminated cable (times how many you cut) could put a huge ESD spike into the system if lightning hits something a block away.

I do agree nobody really fixes anything anymore in the computer business but I figured that out in the late 80s and started doing other things

It's all about time & money; management doesn't want their techs to spend their entire day troubleshooting a problem with Word, when the system could be wiped (via network ghosting/reimaging) and the problem is guaranteed to be fixed after a 30-45 minute download process.

The problem arises when it was really a hardware issue and the download didn't fix anything. So they reload the system, still no joy. Now they have lost a day or two's data (how good was your backup strategy), a lot of down hours and they still have to send someone to figure out what the real problem was.
The industry has lost the whole concept of basic problem analysis. They run a script and shotgun possible solutions until something works. Unfortunately sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

A problem with Word isn't likely to be hardware-related; if there are problems with the core OS and having everything restored doesn't fix it, then we pull the unit and do hardware tests. Hardware problems are pretty rare (aside from keyboards & mice), but when they do they are most often dead hard drives and the occasional power supply.

Nobody SHOULD be storing anything of importance on their local hard drives; other than their iTunes libraries, we tell everyone to store their files on the network. Not only is networked storage on a RAID-5 array, it is backed up off-site every night, and it is access-controlled, whereas anyone can access C:.

Of course, I can only speak for our department and organization.

LOL,
Welcome to the results of short-form IT courses.

I know hard drives are #1 on the hit parade but a bad memory stick can cause strange problems that might only show up on one program and not even be a solid bug.
I had one that only failed when you were burning a DVD.

You seem to have excellent data management there. Your shop is rare.

Unsure how this is different from the common situation of a hub/switch connected to in-wall building wiring that has no PC connected to the other end. Not every drop is used on every installation, some never get used, some are only used occasionally, etc.

I view it as a result of the continued dumbing down of America.