Troubleshooting by train...

[jebr]

About 10 years ago, I was working for a VPN service provider. One of our client was a large rail company.


They had multiple sensors and switchyards connected via VPN for monitoring purposes, and one of the switchyard had a flaky connection. It could stay up for days, but sometimes it would randomly drop.

Every single tech that we sent tested everything, and it always worked as long as they were there. The client started to get angry with us and we were running out of ideas. Until one of our most trusted tech realised something :

Every time he was on site, the yard supervisor closed the rail line near the shack where the equipment was located. He had an epiphany, what if it was caused by interference from a locomotive? After all, it's an enormous electrical device on wheels...

Enter the most heavy and expensive troubleshooting we ever used, an EMD SD40, with three ballast railcars.

Read the whole story (and the comments) at /r/talesfromtechsupport

 

[Ryan]

Great story. Greater comments.