[vigormortis]

Back in the early 2000's I was the networking lead for a start-up managed services company. We made heavy use of Extreme Networks switches at the time. Though our experience with the hardware was largely positive, we did have a batch of rack switches that were consistently flakey, so we took them out of service and stacked them in a closet awaiting RMA. As we had the the unfortunate timing of starting business shortly before the dot.com implosion, the company didn't stay afloat for long and I jumped ship.

Fast forward 18 months and I found myself working as a systems engineer for a Pharmacy Benefits provider. I was not part of the networking team, but the networking lead approached me to help troubleshoot some pernicious network stability issues for their POS systems. They were also an Extreme Networks shop, so they they figured I might have some insight. The networking lead tried to set me up with access to the switches and was confused when I appeared to already have an account provisioned. Once I connected and began looking at the switch logs, I had simultaneous deja vu and "are you kidding me???" reactions. These were the very same switches I had personally configured and later scrapped during my previous gig. Apparently my new employer had bought the switches during a fire sale and put them into production with little to no configuration and they were just insanely lucky that their ip ranges and vlans overlapped what I had previously used.

I didn't stay very long at this company. Thankfully the haunted switches didn't follow me to my next job.