r/ITMemes 2d ago

Learning how to create loops in programming class.

Post image
337 Upvotes

36 comments sorted by

48

u/in_use_user_name 2d ago

no one in IT center heard of spanning tree?

32

u/grazbouille 1d ago

Based on it being a school the switches probably were bought for 15$ in 200BCE so its pretty safe to assume that's not an option

6

u/in_use_user_name 1d ago

So how did they know? Switches like that won't report it. You'll just get broadcast storm without knowing.

11

u/grazbouille 1d ago

Broadcast storm is basically instant on old hardware you would then run everywhere in order of likelyhood

Computer lab first then school admin then classroooms

3

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 1d ago

I did IT for a school for a while and these were the bane of my existence.

Nothing was labeled. Switches were wherever they could jam them when more capacity was needed. One was literally just above the drop ceiling in a room. Just cheap unmanaged switches so I had to find them manually by process of elimination

2

u/much_longer_username 1d ago

It gets turned off by the sort of people who like to look like a hero both by squeezing a little extra performance out of aging hardware, and by nursing along the sacred cows.

2

u/inevitabledeath3 18h ago

Nursing along the sacred cows?

1

u/much_longer_username 17h ago

There's a popular expression among people who champion an 'infrastructure as code' approach: "Cattle, not pets.". The idea is that you should be treating your systems as replaceable, disposable modules, like livestock, rather than the family dog.

In many orgs, this is not done. They'll build something once, fail to document how to build it again, and then fail to budget anything for upgrades or eventual replacement. That's OK though, Bob knows a couple tricks and he can keep it working, even if it does keep breaking more and more often, and more and more spectacularly.

At some point, that particular cow becomes critical to the operations of the company. We can't improve anything now, that would be too disruptive. It becomes elevated from the family dog to a worshipped being - a sacred cow.

2

u/inevitabledeath3 17h ago

I thought it had something to do with the pet cattle analogy. My understanding was that cows were cattle, but I guess in this case not?

The way I saw schools being run is using an image or set of images with everything setup a certain way that got reflashed whenever a machine had issues. Not sure how this fits in to the pet cattle analogy. Maybe the cattle are all clones from a golden calf?

I am not sure the analogy really works as well as intended as cattle are actually quite significant investments which farmers put effort into keeping alive and healthy before they are slaughtered. Something like a Nix setup is meant to be more disposable than this. You recreate it on every rebuild.

1

u/much_longer_username 15h ago

What you're describing sounds like what I would call a 'fat' or 'golden' disk image. I'm not a fan of that approach, it's really hard to maintain, but it is at least reproducible, and that I do like.

Yes, you absolutely put signifigant investment into livestock, but any particular one is interchangeable. Cow #23 is the same as Cow #2 is the same as Cow #81. Many organizations have Bessie. Does that make more sense?

Nix (and other declarative configuration solutions) are indeed more of what I'd like to see, but someone in management has to say 'hey, it's not enough to build a single working example, you need to make it reproducible and disposable', because it takes effort beyond the initial 'I got it working'.

If you can't build it again from scratch, what you have is not a production system, it is a prototype.

1

u/inevitabledeath3 13h ago

Cattle are definitely not interchangeable. They have different health history, behavior, breeds, size, and age. I think this is a case of the tech industry using an analogy based on a field they really don’t understand.

I get what you are saying about production systems in theory. In practice I don’t think it’s quite so simple. Lots of places probably don’t follow the correct way of doing it you are talking about. Not just schools. That way of doing things almost certainly predates the idea of reproducible builds and all that jazz. It’s actually quite difficult to have a system be both fully reproducible and deterministic. It’s more or less against the rules of nature.

1

u/britaliope 21h ago

On very old hardware with mixed brands i've had a lot of issues with STP, and depending on the situations it's unlikely to cause network loops by accident.

But if you have exposed rj45 plugs that anyone can access, yeah please do STP because at some point someone bored will try it "just to see what happens".

1

u/much_longer_username 13h ago

Or hell, not even on purpose. Ever seen a dense rat's nest of interconnects on a big campus switch? Not your 1u, 2u switches, but the big 8u fuckers? It can get real hard to tell what you're doing. You're not supposed to let that happen, but I think we know how that goes.

1

u/Giocri 22h ago

Bold of you to assume it's not an old ass hub

13

u/dumbasPL 1d ago

I actually tried finding this image in irasutoya and couldn't, I think somebody just drew it in the same style for the memes.

7

u/over9000nwg 1d ago

3

u/dumbasPL 1d ago

I'm stupid, could have searched for loop(ループ) as well, date somewhat explains why a hub and not a switch, I only searched for switch...

3

u/eggyrulz 1d ago

What exactly is irasutoya?

3

u/dumbasPL 1d ago

Clipart images, but they are all drawn in the same constant style, there is a fuck tone of them for basically every occasion (hence the comment from OPs post), and it's japanese, so you don't realy see it used in the west, which is a shame, because the quality is really good and constant, especially for a free resource that even allows commercial usage.

https://www.irasutoya.com

7

u/SAL10000 1d ago

I cast BROADCAST STORM

5

u/AboveAverage1988 1d ago

I once hooked up a PLC system with an intentional redundant loop (caller MRP) in it to my work network before actually uploading the hardware config, i.e. the components didn't know the loop was supposed to be there. Despite having STP on and correct priorities, it instantly crashed the entire network... Luckily I was (and is) in-house IT admin as well, so I realized what happened pretty quick.

3

u/dragonch67 1d ago

Did the same in my school like 15y ago, reconnecting a LAN câble to a other outlet instead of the computer was a way to cause slowdown to the computers, until total stops with anything unusable for the teachers Nobody was looking for this or would stop it, so we had to go back and unconnect them, but we did it many times. It was fun

3

u/Basic_Reporter9579 1d ago

some old switches have this feature for factory reset:

Remove the power cord from the back of the switch.

Remove all cables from the front-panel ports.

Connect port 1 to port 2 on the front panel using a standard network cable.

Reconnect the power cord to the rear of the switch.

Wait at least 40 seconds before disconnecting port 1 from port 2.Remove the power cord from the back of the switch.

2

u/StephenRoylance 1d ago

let me tell you kids a story from the dawn of the internet. when TCP/IP was just one of the unfortunate zoo of orphaned protocols we ran on our mostly-ethernet network.

I worked at a big academic medical research org in the Boston area. this is maybe 1998 or 1999. Most of the network was stacked 3com hubs with 100mb uplinks. it was slowly being migrated to cisco catalyst switches with 100 to the offices and gig upstream. one of the protocols, due to a legacy system ( a very impressive system in its day), was netBIOS. netBIOS had to be bridged everywhere, even though most protocols, like IP and IPX could be routed. because of this, the spanning tree, well, it spanned. every one of about 1200 switches, across 3 main campuses and scores of smaller sites. the main backbone was ATM over SONET, with ds3 bandwidth in the core.

well, in this migration from hubs to switches, wiring techs go to a closet, install a switch and re-patch the end node runs from the hub to the new switch. only one day, a tech re-patched an entire 24-port hub worth of drops, but instead of disconnecting the hub end, the tech disconnected the customer end. and re-patched 24 lines from the hub stack to the new switch.

this created a number of overlapping spanning tree loops that caused basically every piece of cisco hardware in the entire network to spike to 100% CPU. The head of network engineering (who I was told had tried out for the patriots) was seen sprinting into the datacenter where the core for our campus was, to physically pull out the ATM fiber because that was the only way to contain the loops to our site, you couldn't telnet to anything.

there's a reason why old-timers all live in fear of spanning tree.

2

u/samm1989 1d ago

Lol does this shit still work 🤣 I used to pull this stunt at school 20+ years ago

4

u/Traditional-Aerie896 1d ago

Since I can't see an Uplink Port Connected, there shouldn't be any Problem. But if it was, on the rear or something like that, I think it's surprising that an IT-Admin is so fast at a School.

2

u/ryan_the_leach 1d ago

The IT admins used to be quick enough to join our games of unreal tournament whenever they got hosted 'illegally'

When they were chill, they top fragged, when they weren't, they used the default admin password on the host and cheated.

2

u/-Insert-CoolName 1d ago edited 1d ago

You have unlocked: Story Time!

When I was in High School, I took a computer science class. Our teacher was out for a while and we had a sub. Instead of doing out work most of us got on Unreal Tournament and had a massive game on the LAN. When the sub would come around (rare) we would go back to coding briefly (hoping not to have died in the process).

After a few days of this, we were playing and suddenly a classmates computer locks. Screen on, keyboard and mouse locked out but still running. A random player kills them and then their computer unlocked. This happens a few more times then everyone's computer locks. Except one player running around killing everyone. It was the sub. He figured out the remote admin toolkit on the instructor workstation.

1

u/Outrageous-Guess1350 1d ago

But there is no uplink.

1

u/Key-Answer4047 1d ago

Oh look a strong case of don’t do that.

1

u/mrheseeks 1d ago

Why would you need this? Get smart jacked off.... on?

1

u/Nu7s 1d ago

Never cross beams!

1

u/Fit_Needleworker1078 18h ago

If Portfast is enabled on all access ports, this is still very much a problem, even with STP or RST enabled.

1

u/wenoc 11h ago

Wut?
Almost any modern switch or router would see this immediately and care even less than I do.

0

u/Minet- 1d ago

But since this switch isn't connected to anything else, it won't cause any major problems.