What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

I bought an internet radio from pioneer...
Unfortunately, the remote control has a small delay. So I thought, maybe there's an app to control the radio. But after downloading the app could not connect. During a network scan several services appeared. You are able to update the firmware via an unprotected web interface which makes me sad. But that's not the best thing yet. You can also connect to the device via the telnet port. Guess which user you are...

TL;DR
I accidentally surpassed(?) my user permissions and closed some of my classmates browsers and locked up a terminal for me

In school we have 2 primary operating systems: Windows and Ubuntu. Windows is hell in general and but not as hell as the firefox installation on Ubuntu.

"Just loaded this page. Now wait half a minute so that I can render it"
"Woah, woah, woah. Slow there. You just made an input event. Give me those 5 seconds to compute what you just did"

Executing "top" or "htop" shows you a long list of firefox processes with a cpu usage of 99.9%, since the whole school shares that linux environment.

Anyway, one day it was way more servere than normally and I way forced to kill my firefox instances. So I pressed CTRL+ALT+T for that terminal, waited 5 minutes until it accepted input typed "killall firefox" with a delay of half a minute per character and smahed that enter key.

At this very point in time I could hear confusion from every corner of the room. "What happened to firefox?"

Around 30% of the opened browsers where abruptly stopped. I looked back to my screen noticed I was logged out. I couldn't login from that terminal for the rest of that day.

Our network admin, which happened to be there, since the server is just next door, said that this was just convenience, but the timing was too perfect so I heighly doubt that.

I felt like a real hackerman even if it was by accident :)

Ok, so I basically spent my weekend trying to work out why the fuck my python docker container would not connect to my mariadb docker container. Tried fucking everything, bridged network, host network, links (even though theyre deprecated), you name it. It would NOT WORK!

In my despair I finally turned to StackOverflow. There I was told 5min after posting the question that the reason was probably that mysql is a quite heavy service, which takes a bit to start up.

I thought to myself "Oh, get the fuck outta here, that can't be it, shit's way too easy to work!"
I tried it nevertheless by adding a 10sec delay before querying the database AND THE MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT ACTUALLY WORKS!! So, I essentially just lost a weekend because I was too impatient... I think I'm gonna punch some trees now.

Customer complains that the deployed desktop app is slow at site x.
I check it out with users at site x, and indeed, it does have a delay when trying to connect to a share on a server.
Checks with users at site y and z, no issues.
After a bit of digging, the resolve of a DNS record is most likely the culprit.
Send the ticket to the customer network team to investigate.
Get it back after an hour.

"We have pinged the DNS name, and it responds fine, there must be a bug in the application".

Oh and also, I wrote this rant at work, in my head, with a lot more cursewords involed.

Code your own damn stuff!

I am building a RFID and button controlled music player for kids.
I am using a couple of different modules for that. The one for the input was really laggy. I thought it was so laggy because of the network delay. I tinkered with it a week but it didn't improved. So I just coded my own module which was much easier to do than I thought.
It was a really rewarding to code something yourself in less than a day instead of trying to get something working for a week.

Sometimes I have to work with physical hardware. There are over 300 machines in our lab, split among two subnets. But for some reason, I can never access my machines by hostnames.

Every other week, there's an IP conflict on this network, requiring me to log into the active directory server and delete old DNS entries. This usually happens because someone decided to deploy 64 VMs on a huge server, all at once, didn't boot them with a delay, let alone with with a warning to IT.

Then when my superior asks how my progress has been and I respond with "I can't even get the machines to ping each other by hostname, there's something wrong with the DNS:, I get the following response: "HOW COME NOBODY ELSE IS HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THIS. YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT", from someone who spends 90% of the year abroad, working remotely.

TIL how time-delay relays are used in circuits with a hell lot of power. For example to power and control the motor of a machine that lifts 20 people up to the sky and back to ground again.
FYI this is a simple circuit. We will hopefully start experimenting with SPS/Speicherprogrammierbare Steuerung (Programmable Logic Controllers). I cannot wait to make use of our predesigned circuits with complex logic gates with the new unit we will get to know.
Unfortunately, we will do practical networking (testing cables for the signal strength and speed, building a network of telephones and call each other - guess this is going to be the funniest part lol, etc.) before the SPS and LOGO software phase.

Btw. I am doing an all-nighter rn and repeating everything we did in our recent signal calculation lesson. We have another exam tomorrow.

Duck! this sloppy whiny winnfsd.

Yay! Let's use state of the art Docker with a VirtualBox VM on Windows10.

Don't get me wrong.
The Docker containers in this VM doing a great job on performance.

But in the very moment a Docker container uses a mounted folder via the windows network filesystem, all hell is breaking loose.

Building a vendor folder using a composer Docker image with 84 Packages takes about 15 seconds when cache has been warmed up.

The same Docker command pointing on a folder mounted to Windows Filesystem with warmed up cache takes about 10 Minutes!@&&@""+&

And what is the duckin' reason for this delay?
Because every transfer of a teeny tiny file has to establish a connection to fat ass Windows OS and has to pass it's glorious "security" layer.

DUCK it!
For real.

I currently working on a shell script which builds the whole vendor folder on a volume on Docker VM.
After completion, the shell script will compress the folder to one file.
This one file will be transferred over this god damned network filesystem.
Finally the script will unpack the compressed vendor folder in it's destination folder.

*sigh*
What year is it?!??

Ever since I started learning about React with Typescript my respect for design patterns that restrict how state can change has grown massively. On the web, nothing happens when you say it should happen; everything always takes a while to execute and there is always a transactional period between validating an action with client-side state and receiving the result from the server, and if you want to account for that everything becomes infinitely more complex and you eventually end up with mutexes.

What it's like to be a network
engineer...translated into normal people speak
User: I think we are having a major road issue,

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are
fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I'm pretty sure the roads are down
because I'm not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What
do you mean you aren't getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered
them, now I'm not getting them. It has to be a
road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are
you getting pizzas from?

User: I'm not really sure. Can you check all
places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don't even know all the places that
deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I'll check...No, I just looked and
Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I'm pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just
allow all food from Subway and we can see if
pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I've allowed all food from
Subway, but I don't think that is the issue.

Usher: Yeah I'm still not getting pizza. Can you
check the roads?

Me: It's not the roads, the roads are fine. I'm
pretty sure Subway isn't the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It's Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does
deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one
in a different town?

User: I don't know. Can you allow pizza from
all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can't do that. Can you get me an
address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can
you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns
and I'll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don't have time for that. Okay, I
looked at the local one and it looks like they
have sent you pizza in the past and they are
currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try
ordering a pizza while I watch.

Usher: Yeah still no pizza. I'm guessing they
are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you
check the freeway to make sure they can get
through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't
even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue,

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove
from the Papa Johns to the address they have
on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa,
Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to
look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What's
your new address?
User: I'm not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second...Okay, I found
your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try
ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!
Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize
for the delay in the pizza but there was a major
road issue that was preventing the pizza from
getting to me. The network engineer has fixed
the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn't the roads...whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue
where Chinese food isn't getting to me? think
it may be a road issue

Nobody likes chatbots/conversational UI for anything other than chat, right?

I have a savings app with conversational UI. I press one of a number of options e.g. "Savings". There's this artificial delay after the network request has been made so that it looks like the app is typing back at you. Why???

You then get another limited set of options, or you can tap "Back". These options are supposedly as if you typed it back as a response.

I can get three "questions" (levels) deep, let's say to deposit cash, only for it to turn around and say that I've reached a daily/weekly limit? At each level there's this awful delay, and you already knew I wouldn't be able to perform the action regardless of my responses after my very first "message"!

Why is this good/popular? And the whole thing totally breaks if there's any loss of connectivity.

Stop it. Please.