Pulled Cat6 through an old warehouse in St. Louis last week, found a network closet from 1995

Was running new drops for a warehouse conversion into office space. Opened up a closet we thought was empty and found a 3Com SuperStack hub still running. The IT guy there said it was actually forwarding packets to a printer in the break room. That thing had been online for 30 years without anyone touching it. Makes me wonder how many ancient devices are still chugging away in people's networks. Has anyone else stumbled across old gear that was still working?

2 comments

2 Comments

loganhart16d ago

Thirty year old hub still moving packets to a printer nobody probably even needed anymore. Makes you wonder what else is out there that just keeps working because nobody thought to unplug it. There's probably old servers and switches in basements that have been running so long they're part of the building's foundation at this point. Its like the whole tech world is built on layers of stuff nobody wants to touch.

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dianab6816d ago

Thats exactly it @loganhart. You just described half the places Ive worked at. Nobody wants to be the one to pull the plug on something thats technically still running, even if nobody really uses it anymore. Its like this weird tech superstition or something. You unplug one old switch and suddenly the whole network crashes because it turns out some ancient system was secretly relying on it. So instead folks just let it sit there gathering dust and humming away. Feels like every company has at least one of those "ghost servers" in a closet somewhere that nobody even remembers installing. And yeah the layers thing is spot on too. Its like tech archaeology at this point.