DHCP servers: There Can Be Only One. Some of the problems caused by misconfigured systems can be a real nightmare. If you turn on the DHCP server in your laptop, you will probably have all traffic from ‘your’ clients routed through your laptop, until you turn your laptop off and then those clients will stop working. I run a nightly script on one of the networks I maintain to detect just this issue.
Yes! I've lived this before, it's interesting to see how fragile the network infrastructure we rely on daily is. There's no one stopping you (except for a competent network admin) from plugging in a DHCP server and handing out addresses on your local network. This is mostly true of the greater Internet as well, we rely heavily on people being good neighbours and not doing silly things.
I remember having to track down a network issue once when I worked as a network admin on my university campus: For some reason, the network on one floor of a dorm went down, it took us way to long to figure out that someone had just plugged an ethernet cable into the wall, the only problem was the other end of that cable was also plugged into the wall. Our switch did not like that (: We eventually got smarter switches, but it was eye-opening to see how easy it was to disrupt service for a whole floor of students.
DHCP servers: There Can Be Only One. Some of the problems caused by misconfigured systems can be a real nightmare. If you turn on the DHCP server in your laptop, you will probably have all traffic from ‘your’ clients routed through your laptop, until you turn your laptop off and then those clients will stop working. I run a nightly script on one of the networks I maintain to detect just this issue.
Yes! I've lived this before, it's interesting to see how fragile the network infrastructure we rely on daily is. There's no one stopping you (except for a competent network admin) from plugging in a DHCP server and handing out addresses on your local network. This is mostly true of the greater Internet as well, we rely heavily on people being good neighbours and not doing silly things.
I remember having to track down a network issue once when I worked as a network admin on my university campus: For some reason, the network on one floor of a dorm went down, it took us way to long to figure out that someone had just plugged an ethernet cable into the wall, the only problem was the other end of that cable was also plugged into the wall. Our switch did not like that (: We eventually got smarter switches, but it was eye-opening to see how easy it was to disrupt service for a whole floor of students.
Ah, yes, broadcast storms. Look up SONOS Blacklist sometime, what a nightmare.