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Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

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Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#11
post #8
post #7

I really really really wish that Apple would always use DHCP and get an open IP instead of assuming their last one is still good just so they can say they connect to WiFi 100 ms faster than anyone else. It is so infuriating and causes all the devices in my house to fight for their rightful slot.

Is this true? I hadn't even noticed, because I assign every device a static DHCP assignment so I can categorize devices numerically. That is really messed up, and akin to what Google does with TCP/HTTP for connections to google.com in order to ensure it gets first byte faster. Companies are doing all sorts of "performance hacks" that just straight our break standards, and therefore break interop. I know for Apple dev…

Apple isn't breaking a standard. If the IP address was reassigned to another device it'll just get told that upon attempting to use it.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#13
post #7

I really really really wish that Apple would always use DHCP and get an open IP instead of assuming their last one is still good just so they can say they connect to WiFi 100 ms faster than anyone else. It is so infuriating and causes all the devices in my house to fight for their rightful slot.

Perhaps this is more of a problem with some router manufacturers/firmwares than others? I've had a bunch of difference devices running several different OSes (including several Apple devices) connected to a Netgear router running stock firmware for the past year and some change and have had no trouble at all.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#15
I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this.

People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then forget that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#16
post #7

I really really really wish that Apple would always use DHCP and get an open IP instead of assuming their last one is still good just so they can say they connect to WiFi 100 ms faster than anyone else. It is so infuriating and causes all the devices in my house to fight for their rightful slot.

Why are they fighting? Why is your router aggressively reusing the IPs as soon as the lease expires? In my house, all of my devices end up with pretty stable IPs (even non-Apple ones) and I haven't done anything special to configure this. I assume my router holds onto previously-assigned IPs in case the device comes back as long as there's still unassigned IPs available to give out to new devices, though I haven't in…

Clients will usually request their previous IP in the request, and servers will often prefer to give clients their previous IP even if they don't request it. It's also pretty common that the client still has a valid lease (as far as the server is concerned), which it makes sense for the server to reissue.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#17
post #4

Please don't recommend people pipe curl output to a shell. Yikes.

eh it's fine. sure, technically speaking you're giving your machine over to whoever wrote that script. they could do anything! but actually, the script is usually useful and safe. Like this one.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#18

I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this. People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then forget that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.

Couldn't have said it better.

That script will be hanging around on people's laptops for years, if not decades (for people that migrate their macOS installations to new machines) at the end of the long tail.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#19
post #17
post #4

Please don't recommend people pipe curl output to a shell. Yikes.

eh it's fine. sure, technically speaking you're giving your machine over to whoever wrote that script. they could do anything! but actually, the script is usually useful and safe. Like this one.

You know that, I know that, but the thousands of people getting desensitized and trained to run random terminal commands like this to "fix their wi-fi" usually don't.

The problem isn't even pasting curl output into sh – it's instructing non-technical users to run any terminal commands, in my opinion.

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