Yowza. So, this marks week seven of trying to bludgeon this ship's bletcherous, losing, cretinous, bagbiting network into working something akin to correctly. So far, I've rewired about 60% of the trouble spots, juggled switch hardware, installed enough software patches to make a rock sick and beaten my head against typical Microsoft bogosity. Why is it that on two machines of theoretically identical configuration, both hardware and software, that a given patch will make one lose, while the other has no problem at all? Worse, it's never something obvious like a configuration file. No, it's always that goddamn fucking infernal Windows registry or worse, a corrupt file. Why does file corruption happen so frequently on Windows? I mean, seriously. The more of this I see, the more I think the whole world needs to get onboard with something like ZFS, which has end-to-end checksumming. Versioning filesystems would be awesome too. I mean, VMS has only had one for maybe 30 years, it's not like the rest of the industry is that far behind the eight ball... Ahem.
Anyway, things are improving. I found the manual for these switches and the damn ATM LANE server-cum-router thingies, so I fixed all the problems there. Duplex mismatches? I mean, really? It's bad enough that only some of the switch ports can perform correct autonegotiation (only the 10/100 copper ports), but we can't get it right by hand either? Well, to be fair, the last sysadmin didn't know why it mattered - it was just funny verbiage that he didn't understand. If it wasn't point-and-click, he was lost. Even though changing interface speed/duplex settings is point-and-click on Windows, but that's Another Rant. And on top of that, management in their infinite wisdom didn't let me poke at anything. Not much, anyway. They said, "Well, it's always sucked. That's just how it is."
Color me crazy, but I've never liked that answer. Sometimes it really can't be helped, but usually something's wrong. So, when we had a recent top-to-bottom change of management, I got 'em to take the gloves off. It's been a lot of work, but even though pulling thorns out of my side hurts, it's better once done.