# GATE-02: the far side of the wall

**Task** FSN-2299 · **Walk** 2026-09-10, 13:04-15:40 · **Author** facilities
& physical security, badge 338110-2 · **Ref** WLN-2214 (Wardline retirement
review), check chk-0041

I was asked to find, physically, the thing that monitoring check chk-0041 has
been pinging successfully for eleven years and six months. The review says the
answers come from about seventeen metres from the poller. The poller is on the
second floor of building one, in the operations room. I walked seventeen
metres from it and I found a wall.

## What the review handed me

```
check        chk-0041 ("gate-02 icmp")
target       192.0.2.41
samples      5,785,092 ok / 0 fail, 2015-03-02 to date
median rtt   0.42 ms - about 17 m of cable inside a building
inventory    no row.  DNS: none.  DHCP: none.
             terraform: none.  rack diagrams: none.
route        none - the poller itself cannot send a packet that way
```

The check answers. The host that runs the check cannot address the target.
Those two facts arrived in my queue as one task.

## The walk

Seventeen metres from the poller, in a straight line through drywall, is the
north stairwell door. I walked the floor with a tape and a rangefinder. What
is at seventeen metres:

- The door frame of a service gate. The gate itself is gone. The frame is
  2009-spec, painted over twice, and the door-closer is still on it, holding
  nothing.
- Over the frame, conduit running to a badge-reader position on the corridor
  side. The reader is there, 2009-spec, same paint. I pulled its head: the
  cable stub inside is cut flush with the conduit mouth. The cut is old and
  the copper is green. Nothing has fed that reader in years, and the door it
  governed was bricked up before this estate's asset register begins.
- The stairwell itself: nothing. Every landing has a camera. I requested the
  hour around 03:17:09 on 2026-09-07, because the access export says the bay
  light off that minute and I wanted the frames. The footage shows a wall.
  Walls do not move.

## What I filed

I opened work order FSN-2299 to remove the orphan reader and cap the conduit.
While standing at the wall I ran a laptop on the operations room's own
network, and chk-0041 polled ok at 0.39 ms with my hand on the plaster. The
wall is 0.12 m thick. The stairwell is four metres deep. It is not in the
wall, and it is not in the stairwell. The work order closed as `asset not
present`. The check is still green.

## The thing I cannot file

My rangefinder says 17.4 m to the far wall of the stairwell, through the door
glass. The eleven-year minimum round trip for chk-0041 is 0.31 ms. The
minimum I could produce from a laptop patched in the same room, to the
poller, all afternoon, was 0.11 ms.

0.31 plus 0.11 is 0.42, which is the median. I wrote that down as arithmetic
and not as an opinion, because I do not know which two places the numbers
travel between, and the register has no column for a distance with no places.

See also [[stories/eleven-year-check]], [[stories/axfr-from-53]],
[[stories/acx-legacy-01]].

Source: the pages linked above, read 2026-09-13. Invented.