For want of a Nail – Single Wall-wart Downs Net and Phones

In many systems there are single points of failure that you don’t realize are there until they act up.

We have fiber to my office, which goes through a series of devices until it becomes “ours” and network ready.

From the locked fiber “box” the fiber optic goes to a Network Terminating Equipment (NTE) box and then to a Managed Router/Media Conversion where the fiber goes it but comes out as ethernet.

Yesterday morning at 5:30ish I was texted by the team, “No internet, no phone. Reason to think it puked about 7 PM last night.”

Great.  Simply great.

Usual checks once I was in – is everything powered up, does anything have warning lights or weird noises?

Everything looked normal, so the next step is unplug it all, wait a minute or so, then power it back up and check again.

Sure looked like things were in order.

But they were not and we remained “hard down.”

A series of calls created a a trouble ticket and after more than 90 minutes of phone calls, on hold while the tech tests teh system, and listening to bad pop music while on hold, it was finally agreed that a technician needed to look at our installation.

Turns out the wall-wart for that NTE I mentioned above failed.

I was impressed that the field tech identified, isolated, confirmed and replaced the errant wall-wart in less time than I’ve needed to write about it.

I was shown where on the plug side of the NTE to look for signs of life. That it is installed on a network board that you would need to maneuver into the service room’s corner and know what you are looking for is awkward, and I will claim as the reason I didn’t recognize the problem myself earlier.

I also realize that I accepted the “pilot light” on the electrical box where much of this gear hooks into, as the indication that things had power, rather than pedantically checking each piece for its own signs of life.

Technically this part of the system is “theirs” and only the service provider is supposed to do things with it.

Biggest lesson is that the enterprise is rather dependent on this and a few other single low-tech items, in this case a wall-wart. Then some of this higher tech stuff is single units that would take a tech to replace.

But the wall-warts, those are low tech enough that perhaps some spares might be useful?

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Now the Amateur Radio part – while sitting on hold or listening to provider remote techs talk in their private jargon, my mind wandered to how we have similar single point of failures baked into ham radio.

In a remote ready environment, IT offers up lots of single points of failure.  In a more conventional setup the typical lack of redundancy, including secondary power sources & antennas that we are adept at practical deployment, come into play.  In the vintage boat anchor world, the knowledge, skills, bench equipment and supplies to keep legacy radios in operation is a factor.

Some of these I have addressed in prior posts.  Some I am working through right now (power supplies in specific).  Some are included in my “Creating Durable Systems“series or posts.

Lots to think about.

73

Steve
K9ZW