I just spent the last 8 hours chasing a phantom...

I just spent the last 8 hours chasing a phantom network issue. Nothing made sense. The server wouldn't connect to the internet, but it would connect to some local devices. Pings from the server to other devices worked, but not vice versa. It would connect via wifi, but only with a dynamic IP address.. as soon as i tried to set it to static.. no joy.

The issue was all caused by one intermittent pin on a trunk cable running between my airport base station in the under stairs cupboard and the switch in my loft. It'd show the link as being up, but wouldn't transfer data on it. But it was occasionally working so when i'd done some tests they'd come back good. No idea why it caused the issue with the static address on wifi, that now seems to be working too... perhaps it was a red herring that was fixed by something else i did today.

8 hours.

ARRRGH!