The case of the random network problems
I once worked in the IT department of a tech manufacturing company where we ran into an interesting problem: A large portion of the office network would go offline for several minutes to an hour or more at random intervals on random days.
The network administrators ran diagnostic after diagnostic, probed logs, and interrogated routers, yet couldn't pinpoint the problem. However, most of the time the network had started working again before they could find the issue.
After weeks of this random, intermittent behavior, the network eventually went down and stayed down. Finally, the network admins had a repeatable problem to locate. They discovered that there were two nodes on the network with the same IP address. One of these was the default gateway for an on-site office networks. The other was a mystery.
