Week 287: Network trouble

A mysterious problem afflicted our home internet connection. The symptoms were strange: 50%+ packet loss to the outside internet, and anything that relied on a connection was very unreliable, except my desktop computer, which was also unreliable, but was able to communicate perfectly with the outside world when connected to a VPN. I ran a test on the VDSL line, which identified a real fault: “impairment in copper joint”. I contacted my ISP; they weren’t seeing any packets loss on the connection, but they would contact OpenReach to fix the hardware. This implied that there was a problem inside the house. I unplugged all the wired devices, and the wireless devices instantly enjoyed perfect internet access. I plugged wires back in until I found the culprit: my desktop. I thought that it might be the network hardware or its driver (it’s a Realtek, so it seemed a likely culprit), but connecting via a USB ethernet adapter resulted in the same problem: within a few minutes of being plugged…