[dfex]

Your comment made me smile - so true!

Or inevitably, someone would be running a DHCP server on their machine for their home network and plug into the (flat) LAN, and somewhere mid-party, suddenly half the machines would drop out as their leases expired and they renewed off the rogue.

I hosted a LAN party, and due to space limitations, we had people upstairs and downstairs on two sides of the house. We were using Coax for Ethernet, and used a T-Piece located in the stairwell and some long cables to branch the network in the three directions we needed it to run (upstairs, living room, dining room). How this ever even worked still remains a mystery to me, but I suspect poorly is probably the answer.

I blame troubleshooting of these issues as the reason I ultimately ended up with a career in networking.

[doublerabbit]

That's the fun right there.

The voodoo, the how the hell it's actually working without knowing how.

[defrost]

No doubt, doing a job badly is almost always a prerequisite for doing it better.