On more than one occasion, disturbing cables to get access for PAT testing brought down the CAD system the next day.
As users, our only tool was a £5 multimeter. IT dept were no help, had no kit, and wouldn't buy any.
I produced a calculation showing that spending £1,000 on a hand-held test meter would pay for itself if it avoided 15 minutes down time across the department. My boss signed up straight away, and next time we were on the fault in the twinkling of an eye.
Chris
I remember wondering why ~half the machines on a thinnet had suddenly stopped seeing the server. You could ping the machines from other machines but not from the server. It turned out that some bright spark wanted two machines in one place so had bought a Tee piece and a length of cable and connected them in. this resulted in a nice set of null points in the network caused by the reflections from the, now, incorrectly terminated machines.
ITYM remove the terminator from one end and use an Avo to find the first machine with a DC connection through the other terminator.
What, even spend a quid on a spare terminator? (still you can always just take the one off the end of the segment, and work back.
Yup, surprising how rarely people think like that. I have had to do that for offices where there is a user being hampered by a geriatric slow PC (usually given to the secretary doing the bulk of the data entry work!) They are often prepared to have you fiddle with it repeatedly, but won't stump up for a replacement. Until you point out that its costing them the equivalent amount as replacement every fortnight in lost productivity!
This used to be in an engineering lab at GEC. So the chances of actually finding an AVO or a fluke or even a working soldering iron for that matter were pretty slim (most people who had one, locked it away and did not admit to having it!)
Having said that it would not really be any quicker than a binary chop. Say 25 machines on a segment - you will find the fault by trial and error in a maximum of five moves of a terminator.
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