[rwg]

At ${PREVIOUS_JOB}, I changed offices and discovered my window wasn't the only thing I lost in the move: SSH sessions kept dying with MAC errors. It happened with multiple computers with different NICs and running different OSes, so it wasn't computer-related. I tried swapping the patch cable, but that didn't change anything.

On a whim, I took the faceplate off the box containing my (100 Mbps) Ethernet and phone jacks and discovered both drops were provided over a single four pair cable originally installed in the late 1980s. More alarmingly, the outer jacket of the cable had been cut off about a foot from the punchdowns on the backs of the keystone jacks, and the entire foot of conductors emerging from the jacket were all untwisted and balled up in the box.

Cutting off about 10 inches of each wire, twisting the pairs back together, and punching the wires back down onto the backs of the jacks fixed the SSH problem...

[adrianN]

You should have used Mosh /s

[js2]

While getting my degree I worked as a sys admin assistant for the CS dept. This was back in the 10BASE2 days. It wasn't unheard of find a professor who had re-arranged his or her office and needed a longer patch cable to connect their workstation, so he or she found some 75 ohm coax and used that and then wondered why the networking wasn't so good.

[throwawayish]

> Mosh /s

Is also a unit of measurement - how many times per second the mosh session would've been broken if it were SSH

/s