Fixed a $0.50 loose wire after 4 hours of head scratching
Spent an entire Saturday troubleshooting a network switch that kept dropping connection. Thought it was the switch itself. Or a firmware bug. Or maybe the power supply. Turned out to be a single Cat5e cable with a bent pin inside the connector. 4 hours of my life. A $0.50 patch cable fixed it. Has anyone else chased a hardware ghost for way too long?
I saw that Linus Tech Tips video where they spent like 6 hours debugging a server and it was just a loose power cable. That kind of stuff makes you want to throw your whole toolkit out the window. A bent pin is definitely the kind of dumb thing that will get you every time.
Honestly that "bent pin inside the connector" bit hit close to home. My buddy once replaced a whole graphics card only to find a single pin in his HDMI cable was bent the whole time.