This post was originally published on Network Computing
There’s a special kind of frustration that comes with a network problem you can’t reproduce. These are the issues that happen only when you’re not looking.
Over the years, I’ve seen my fair share of glitches, outages and misconfigurations. But there’s always that one issue that sticks with you because it’s so strange and so unexpected, it almost feels like a prank. It’s the kind of problem that doesn’t show up in a textbook or a cert exam, and no amount of best practices could have prepared you for it.
A True Story
It started with a ticket from a small branch office: “Users getting kicked off the VPN randomly.” This wasn’t too concerning at first, as we’ve all seen our fair share of flaky Wi-Fi concerns or misconfigured DHCP leases. But then it got stranger. It wasn’t just the VPN. Teams calls would freeze mid-meeting, files wouldn’t save to the shared drive, and sometimes the whole office would just quietly drop off the network for a minute or two — and then come back like nothing happened.
We checked everything. The WAN circuit looked clean. Latency and jitter? Minimal. Packet loss? Zero. The switches were healthy. The firewall logs didn’t show anything weird.
— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on Network Computing.
