John Huntington: I’ve always wondered, what if a forklift operator ran over a power cable and an Ethernet line and crushed them together, shorting the high voltage into the low-voltage Ethernet switch? I’ve seen interfaces blown out on switches before, but I was never around when it happened. But I had a couple extra switches and some other parts laying around, so I decided to do a test; the results really surprised me.
2 comments:
Okay, well, first off the slow-motion videos of them blowing up circuits with sparks and smoke were amazing--recommend it just for that. But also, while I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario in the real world (at least without something else going terribly wrong, like a fire), it is an interesting experiment, and honestly shows some resiliency I did not expect. The more useful part of this article was another link to an article about choosing a network switch for your show, which was a great overview of options and what not to choose.
I have very limited experience and knowledge of ethernet and network switches, so this article was not only interesting to see an approach to test an unlikely, but not infeasible. I think it answers a relatively common enough question people may have when they first work with ethernet - what happens when wires that aren’t supposed to touch do? Or what if the wrong signals go through the wrong cables? No one ever really wants to risk testing it, and thankfully cables and their connectors are unique enough it's hard to mix them up, but still a curious thought! This was not only an interesting and entertaining dive into a question born of curiosity, but the videos further illuminated the process that John took towards testing his hypotheses. I also appreciated that John was also learning and ended up figuring out that theoretically after the failure, the 1 GB/s switch could still operate at 100MB/s. As he states, you probably don’t want to do that, but still an interesting thing to determine none the less.
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