There's another one in the cockpit, marked "Avionics Reset".
You joke, but there absolutely are procedures in some airplane QRMs that involve cycling breakers.
I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
41–50 of 171 posts
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#42Earlier 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.
Isn’t this the fundamental point of the push for impotency in configuration management tools?
You just need the state set to “good”, regardless of which bits need to change and current state. Hit the button and it makes it “good”.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#43How 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 before cellular data coverage as ubiquitous and cheap, getting on an using shoddy wifi was an essential skill for anyone with a laptop. The ability to lock onto a stable wifi router, piggyback on another network, or syphon some bandwidth from a network you shouldn't ... those with such abilities managed to book tickets or hotel rooms within seconds of a flight being cancelled. Or, if you were really evil, you kicked everyone in the terminal off the router, hogging all the bandwidth for yourself. At school I had a script to randomize my laptops MAC ever few minutes then reconnect to the school's network. Mine was the only laptop that never got throttled by the wifi police for using too much data in a given session.
I used to have a little wifi antenna on my car. Some called it "wardriving" but I called it being able to check my email while traveling.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#44This reminds me of a conference, attendees were having sporadic problems with accessing the Internet and eventually I was able to capture a trace of the problem: when the main lease network filled up, it started allocating IPs from another block, but with the same gateway. I got a lease for something like 10.1.1.69/24 with a gateway address of 192.168.1.1. I went to the support person and she offered to reset the WiF…
And? Did she escalate it and was it solved?
Don't keep us hanging!
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#45https://nitter.net/erratarob/status/1739132876732674539?s=46...
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#46I 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.
This is a very confusing message.
The "internet reset" message makes sense in all languages that I know. Same with the power button.
What do you think they mean in other languages?
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#47This 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.
Every time I have to interact with a "captive portal", I'm annoyed at the hack implemented through DNS hijacking, rather than implementing and extending 802.1X and/or another layer-2 authentication scheme. The idea seems to have been tossed aside entirely. Instead, every device has to have a web browser. There's not even a way to do surrogate registration for devices that don't have browsers, with Apple TV and Nintendo Switch at launch (added later) being prime examples. IoT and headless gear is also a pain. On trips, I end up bringing my own travel router and using my laptop to auth it by proxy, but it's another thing to remember to bring.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#48I 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.
The entire commercial aviation industry operates using the english language. All pilots communicate with all airports via english. I'm sure FAs are most proficient in english too. Its the lingua franca of the biz.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#49This reminds me of a conference, attendees were having sporadic problems with accessing the Internet and eventually I was able to capture a trace of the problem: when the main lease network filled up, it started allocating IPs from another block, but with the same gateway. I got a lease for something like 10.1.1.69/24 with a gateway address of 192.168.1.1. I went to the support person and she offered to reset the WiF…
And? Did she escalate it and was it solved? Don't keep us hanging!
Almost certainly no. Unlike the assertion made, she didn’t need to escalate it.
Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"
#50Why don't laptops randomize their MACs?