[cesarb]

At least all he had was excessive syscalls.

At work, we had a problem where a computer was spamming the network with DHCP requests. It ended up physically locking us out; the embedded system which controls the card reader and unlocks the door locked up due to the load. I had to use an alternative way to get in, isolated the maglock, and later power-cycled the embedded system.

Needless to say, we enabled storm control on the switch after that.

[tjohns]

You might want to put your security system and other infrastructure hardware on a separate VLAN.

Not only does that help prevent stuff like this, it turns out that a lot of embedded hardware isn't that great from a network security perspective.

[cesarb]

We didn't even have VLANs enabled on the switch back then.

And even then, the storm control is useful; the same broadcast storm also made the office wireless unusable (most APs use a basic rate for broadcast and multicast).