Yesterday around noon, the internet at my company started acting up. No matter, slowdowns happen and there’s roadwork going on outside: maybe they hit the fiber or something. So we waited.
Then our Samba servers started getting flaky. And the database too. Uh oh… That’s different.
We started investigating. Some machines were dropping ICMP packets like crazy, then recovered, then other machines started to become unpingable too. I fired up Wireshark and discovered an absolute flood of IGMP packets on all the trunks, mostly broadcast from Windows machine. It was so bad two Linux machines on the same switch couldn’t ping each other reliably if the switch was connected to the intranet.
So we suspected a DDOS attack initiated from within the intranet by an outside attacker. We cut off the internet, but the storm of packets kept on coming. Physically disconnecting machines from the intranet one by one didn’t do a thing either.
Eventually, we started disconnecting each trunk one by one from the main router until we disconnected one and all the activity lights immediately stopped on all the ports. We reconnected it and the crazy traffic resumed.
So we went to that trunk’s subrouter and did the same thing. When we found the cable that stopped all the traffic, we followed it and finally found one lonely $10 ethernet switch with… a cable with both ends plugged into the switch. We disconnected the cable and everything instantly returned to normal.
One measly cable brought the entire company to a standstill for hours! Because half of the software we have to use are cloud crap or need to call their particular motherships to activate their licenses, many people couldn’t work anymore for no good technical reason at all while we investigated the networking issue.
Anyway, I thought switches had protections against that sort of loopback connection, and routers prevented circular routes. But there’s theory and there’s reality. Crazy!
Our Unifi network collapsed and I have no clue why. One theory was the automatic WiFi bridges that might have acted as loops.
Yeah I’ve had a wireless uplink between two Unifif AP’s on the same switch, the only non Unifi switch, come up by itself and caused a loop. Unlikely that switch only had a 1G uplink to the next switch, all the rest were 10G links, so it mostly only affected devices on that switch.
Edit: thought I’d just say that since then, I always disable wireless uplink on all AP’s, and the global system setting, unless it’s actually used, and only on the APs that need it.