Tobis Blog

Yeah, today I was at the HamRadio, the international amateur (ham) radio convention! I don’t have a license (yet) but every year I am once again convinced to do the necessary exam *now*… 😉 However, at HamRadio there is always something new to discover. And the ham-Flea-Market is – also – always an attraction. But a special highlight every year is the stand of AAtiS, a german educational amateur radio club. They always have some part which (at least I) must have right away, like 1000µF / 400V Elkos or 1,3GBitS optical links… Needless to say, I went shopping…:

That’s the way I see it ;D jk XKCD

My Dad bought a fancy, configurable Gigabit-Switch today and I was all about to set it up. The old one had sporadic malfunctions and so I plugged all the wires in and ping <gateway> Rien ne vas plus In addition to that, my CPU-Load grew up to 100%, controllable by plugging or unplugging the ethernet-cable. “Hm” I thought and started a short diagnostic using Wireshark (which almost instantly crashed). The traffic consisted nearly completely from broadcasts coming from 192.168.1.214. I unplugged the corresponding cable but nothing happened. At some point I remembered that Mr. Schmid told us in a IT-lesson, that loops (a loop is when you connect 2 switchports directly) can cause such broadcast-storms. After that I remembered, that Spanning Tree was disabled in the switch so I started searching. I found a short yellow cable which apparently wanted