"An object reference was discovered to be null today in a web browser window in Frankfurt. Officials said the problem was discovered when some JavaScript application code attempted to read a property from the object reference."
*Well new-ish. The first time I saw that message as a child playing a game on Windows I freaked out and immediately turned off the computer. I was terrified the computer did some illegal math and I was going to be arrested!
... I'll let myself out.
"An admin at a local it shop discovered two 3com nics with the same Mac address while setting up a rack of four new servers. The admin got suspicious when reliable network communication was not possible with any of the two servers and after further investigation found the duplicate addresses."
Sure enough, two generic NE2K NICs had duplicated MAC addresses!
So then it’s 2am and his basement closet is really warm…
Doesn't work out so well when you have a room full of these PCs all getting imaged at thhe same time and suddenly half a dozen on the same switch have the same MAC. :\
(I believe it came down to a BIOS problem and a new version sorted it out.)
The internal network was coax Ethernet. I was working on a networking project at the time and ran a packet sniffer on the internal network and saw that some MAC addresses could access the outside world.
I'm lazy and I didn't like having to go halfway across the building, sit at a slow ass computer to download a datasheet, copy it to a floppy, then walk halfway across the building back to my cube, and finally copy it to my computer. Ain't nobody got time for that.
So I modified my network driver to use one of the macaddrs that had internet access. When I needed something from the Internet, I'd load my modified driver then unload it when I was done. Much easier.
I thought I was doing it for such short periods of time that nobody works ever notice. Of course I was wrong.
After about a month I got called into the IT manager's office. And of course the the macaddr I picked belonged to the VP of engineering who also was the son of the president.
Fortunately they understood that young engineers are dumb and do dumb things and let me off with a warning.
Nearly 150,000 children we're orphaned today when their parents were tragically lost in a catastrophic data importation process. Heartless DBA's were nonchalant as they spoke to the children of their parents being merely "redundant backups".