Making the most of a dumb fax switcher box in the old days

She describes exactly why networks are star configured and feature IDFs and MDFs. Even in analog phone days, commercial installations had telco closets where circuits were distributed. Residential not so much. My condo built in 2004 has the lovely feature of daisy chained network jacks. The only way to make the last jack in the chain work is to patch through all of the other ones. Fortunately wireless is a thing

All the phone jacks in my house come after the kitchen; and there's a short somewhere. So we can only use the kitchen jack unless we figure out where the problem is. And that is, unfortunately, about _this_ much more work than I'm willing to put into it.