What the hell, here's another story. The summary to catch your attention: in the early 2000s, I first became aware of WalMart's full scale switch to product sourcing from China by noting some very unusual automated network to site mappings.

Part of what my team (Network Management) did was write code and tools to automate all of the various things that needed to be done with networking gear. A big piece of that was automatically discovering the network. Prior to our auto discovery work, there was no good data source for or inventory of the routers, hubs, switches, cache engines, access points, load balancers, VOIP controllers...you name it.

On the surface, it seems scandalous that we didn't know what was on our own network, but in reality, short of comprehensive and accurate auto discovery, there was no way to keep track of everything, for a number of reasons.

First was the staggering scope: when I left the team, there were 180,000 network devices handling the traffic for tens of millions of end nodes across nearly 5,000 stores, hundreds of distribution centers and hundreds of home office sites/buildings in well over a dozen countries. The main US Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas was responsible for managing all of this gear, even as many of the international home offices were responsible for buying and scheduling the installation of the same gear.

At any given time, there were a dozen store network equipment rollouts ongoing, where a 'rollout' is having people visit some large percentage of stores intending to make some kind of physical change: installing new hardware, removing old equipment, adding cards to existing gear, etc.

If store 1234 in Lexington, Kentucky (I remember because it was my favorite unofficial 'test' store :) was to get some new switches installed, we would probably not know what day or time the tech to do the work was going to arrive.

ANYway...all that adds up to thousands of people coming in and messing with our physical network, at all hours of the day and night, all over the world, constantly.

Robust and automated discovery of the network was a must, and my team implemented that. The raw network discovery tool was called Drake, named after this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake and the tool that used many automatic and manual rules and heuristics to map the discovered networking devices to logical sites (ie, Store 1234, US) was called Atlas, named after this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)

All of that background aside, the interesting story.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Drake and Atlas were doing their thing, generally quite well and with only a fairly small amount of care and feeding required. I was snooping around and noticed that a particular site of type International Home Office had grown enormously over the course of a few years. When I looked, it had hundreds of network devices and tens of thousands of nodes. This was around 2001 or 2002, and at that time, I knew that only US Home Office sites should have that many devices, and thought it likely that Atlas had a 'leak'. That is, as Atlas did its recursive site mapping work, sometimes the recursion would expand much further than it should, and incorrectly map things.

After looking at the data, it all seemed fine. So I made some inquiries, and lo and behold, that particular international home office site had indeed been growing explosively.

The site's mapped name was completely unfamiliar to me, at the time at least. You might have heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen

I was seeing fingerprints in our network of WalMart's whole scale switch to sourcing from China.