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I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

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Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#31

Post by sunnybeetroot »

jampekka wrote: post #26
thyrox wrote: post #18

How does one learn about this stuff? I learned about basic networking in college (the TCP layers) etc but people doing such stuff sounds like Greek to me. If I want to learn more about what the author is doing, is there a resource like a udemy course or YouTube channel you guys can recommend?

Back in the day you needed to know this stuff to get things working. It was not that uncommon for routers not to have DHCP so you had to input the IPs by hand. I think this may have been even the default and DHCP had to be explicitly enabled (e.g. in Linux installing and configuring dhclient). Also it wasn't that uncommon to expose a computer to internet through the router, so you had to make sure that computer didn'…

I remember ye ol’ port forwarding to get Xbox live to work

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#32

Post by sunnybeetroot »

angrygoat wrote: post #17
ano-ther wrote: post #2

I love that “internet reset” button

I'm a priest who was a software engineer for twenty years. This morning during the service in a small semi-rural church, the bluetooth speaker broke. I paused the service briefly, joked that I knew what to do, and turned it off and on. The IT Crowd got that part of the industry right!

Wow why the career change?

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#33

Post by macintux »

laserbeam wrote: post #10
laurencei wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We laugh as IT experts. But think about it from the end user perspective. Literally the most simple instruction; near fault proof. On an airplane that is thousands of feet from remote IT support (plus "costs"). The instruction to staff; problem with "the Internet"? - press the "Interest Reset" button. Far better than "router restart", "renew DHCP leases" or "reboot IT" Explicit, non ambiguous and without technobabble…

Honestly, that should be the mindset of IT experts in general. Any reset/reset should fix everything and bring the system to a known functional state before doing any work. Obviously you don't want to have to restart to fix issues, but having that as a fallback (especially for issues you didn't predict during development) is great UX.

Hence Erlang. When in doubt, restart the part of your application with bad data.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#36

Post by woodruffw »

This is adjacent to the classic free WiFi hack on airplanes, which is to boot another client off of their DHCP lease by spoofing their MAC.

It’s unfortunate that, below HTTPS and a light smattering of WiFi encryption, there’s essentially no authenticity controls on LAN management protocols.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#37

Post by jltsiren »

ano-ther wrote: post #2

I love that “internet reset” button

This must be something language/culture dependent. To a native Finnish speaker, labeling the button that resets the internet connection as "internet reset" makes perfect sense. Just like the power button only switches the power on/off for that particular device but not for the rest of the world.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#38

Post by flutas »

umvi wrote: post #24
bilsbie wrote: post #21

I upvoted this in the futile hope that the right person sees it.

Would need to know which vendor. I used to work for a company that provided satellite Internet solutions for airplanes but might not be what OP used

In my mind, probably either Panasonic Avionics or Gogo.

If this debugging is true... I'd guess Panasonic from experience working there.

Things like an office scavenger hunt usually took priority over actual work.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#39

Post by flutas »

cheese_van wrote: post #19

Deep in the granite mountain where the internet Kill Switch is located, there is also the US national Internet Reset switch. What exactly, in this fictional universe, is the restoration flow if it is pressed?

You have to unplug the giant router and plug it back in like South Park did.

https://giphy.com/gifs/southparkgifs-l0Hlwi7KzoajIJTI4

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#40

Post by colanderman »

thyrox wrote: post #18

How does one learn about this stuff? I learned about basic networking in college (the TCP layers) etc but people doing such stuff sounds like Greek to me. If I want to learn more about what the author is doing, is there a resource like a udemy course or YouTube channel you guys can recommend?

If you're ok working through a textbook, I found https://intronetworks.cs.luc.edu/current1/html/ to be a thorough course on all things networking.
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