Hi, 
I am a Bob (a user support person) and as such, very familliar with
the tales of the BOFH and the scary monastry and such. It is very
often question of etherkillers in those sort of places. I even built
myself one one day of utter boreness, but never had the courage (nor
the finacial possibility) to use it. My question is as follows. Has
anyone ever tried an etherkiller in real life and described /
photographed the results on a network card / Pc (with permission from
owner, of course). If such depiction /tale exists I really would like
to see that. ( Tip for pics :) no, i'm not perverted, I'm just
curious)

I have made and used an Etherkiller with the permission of the system
owner. Unfortunately, I didn't take any photographs of the event. I
was in high school. :(

Basically, I used the canonical example as seen
http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/img/etherkiller.jpg - a simple
wiring of the hot (red) line to one wire of the RJ-45 cable, neutral
to another, and ground to a third (although in retrospect, who cares
about that?)

We plugged it into an old 3Com 3C509 ISA ethernet card that we had in
a disposable PC (286 something) (this happened in my science fiction
club in high school, by the way.) Turn the machine on, and enjoy the
acrid smell of DEAD components. The jack on the card melted. The boot
ROM socket had a nice hole on it. In adddition, the ISA slot the card
was plugged into got a nice burn mark about halfway down it.

We also threw out the etherkiller afterwards. Didn't want any
evidence.

Hopefully this was amusing at least somewhat. It is true. It was done
with the teacher's full knowledge and consent. It was a blast! :)

I haven't killed any more hardware recently ( :( ) but I'd be glad to
provide specifics on how to construct one and recommended things you
might want to kill.

Thanks for this great question! It was a BLAST to answer :D

/gleffler-ga

What on earth is an etherkiller???

ragingacademic

Hello Vax,

An interesting concept, but every site I found appears to have the
same (or a few) image of an Etherkiller. In one case, a short
explanation of the damaged part of a board (about a 1" radius), but no
pictures.

If that is interesting, let me know - otherwise I'll just leave this
as a comment & not an answer.

To Ragingacademic,

A short search using "Etherkiller" gets you several sites w/ images of
a cable w/ an AC power plug on one end and a network interface on the
other. Make the appropriate connections & destroy the equipment.
[sigh] BOFH by the way is Bastard Operator From Hell and at least one
version of the BOFH story has a discussion of this kind of action as
well.

 --Maniac

Hi Gleffer,
thanks for the info and tale . I made an etherkiller with an
appropriate pinout and I currently keep it in my desk drawer at work,
"Just in case". The reason I was asking for sories about etherkillers
is that I don't think I would have thw heart of friying any peice of
equipment myself, I tend to keep stuff waayyy old  as long as it is
still fonctioning and I don't really like destroying stuff for the
pleasure. Notherless, I was still very curious about the effects of an
etherkiller in real life, since it is mainly a Fictional plot item.
The "just in case" part, is, of course, third degree humour, I will
never fry any equipment (especially from my company)without being
allowed to. But it keeps people wondering. Well maybe one day, when I
have too much time  an a useless token ring RJ45 card at hand...