Your Life at Every Level of Networking (Your Router to the Ocean Floor)

You've already done Level 0. Everyone has. Someone in your family called you about the WiFi, you fixed it in front of witnesses, and that was the moment you got drafted. This is the ladder that runs from the router blinking behind your TV all the way down to a cable lying on the seabed. Nine levels — and the same person standing on every one of them. The only thing that actually changes is how many people notice when you get it wrong. Along the way: why "it's always DNS" is the most honest joke in tech. Why deals between the world's largest networks get made over dinner, using a format that is functionally speed dating. The afternoon a routine command deleted one of the biggest companies on earth from the internet — and locked its own engineers out of the building, because the badge readers were on the network that had just vanished. And the twenty-two ships that are the only reason any of this still works. If you have ever been blamed for a printer, this one's for you. 📎 SOURCES & FURTHER READING 2021 Facebook outage — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage Cloudflare on the 2019 Verizon route leak — blog.cloudflare.com/how-verizon-and-a-bgp-optimizer-knocked-large-parts-of-the-internet-offline-today/ 2022 Rogers outage report — cbc.ca/news/politics/rogers-outage-human-error-system-deficiencies-1.7255641 Subsea cable repair reality — gulfnews.com/technology/red-sea-cable-chaos-subsea-cable-repairs-are-not-an-easy-fix-1.500290675 "Peering Personals" — drpeering.net/white-papers/Peering-Personals.html Impostor syndrome in network engineering — networktocode.com/blog/overcoming-imposter-syndrome/ ▶ WATCH NEXT Your Life at Every Level of a Homelab (Raspberry Pi to Rack) —    • Your Life at Every Level of a Homelab (Ras...   Your Life At Every Level of Linux (Ubuntu to Arch) —    • Your Life At Every Level of Linux (Ubuntu ...   #networking #sysadmin #homelab ⏱ Chapters 0:00 At some point, standing in a kitchen 0:49 Hop zero — the phone call 2:01 Hop one — the login screen 3:28 Hop two — the users 4:45 Hop three — the script 6:08 Hop four — the change window 8:00 Hop five — the hole in the road 9:21 Hop six — the dinner 11:12 Hop seven — the command 13:47 Hop eight — the boat 14:57 Layer eight