As soon as they mentioned the directional wifi i knew it was something physically between the antennas but was guessing human behavior. The tree was a surprise.
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
61–70 of 331 posts
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#62Reminds me of a song by Fleetwood Mac. Wifi only woooorks when it's raaaaining ...
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#63Reminds me of an extremely similar case with a long distance microwave link at a mobile telecom provider in Australia that I worked for. They relied quite heavily on microwave link chains and this particular one was in northern Queensland where fixed lines were hard to find and no local engineers were locally present/aware of the changing environment. Every week day + Saturday, from 7-3 the link would keep cutting ou…
Amazing. Reminds me of the fact that militaries really don't want wind turbines in areas where good radar coverage is important (case in point: the Finnish Defense Forces anywhere near the Russian border); even though the blades aren't metal, they're still a source of noise and radar shadow.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#64Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
Or the "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream" story [1].
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#65Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?
I remember one (might have been a hn-er's comment, dunno) about the computer restarting when the toilet was flushed. Turns out it was due to voltage drop when a compressor turned on to refill the reservoir of the toilet.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#66My guess was that the directional antennas were off by enough that it didn't work well in clear conditions, but the rain refracted the signal enough to work. The actual answer was better :D
This was my first thought too. Tree makes more sense.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#67Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?
My personal example: VoIP phones stopping after the Asterisk server was up for 3 days.
Reason: the server had IPv6 turned on, and it steadily accumulated privacy IPv6 addresses. These addresses were all sent in a packet describing the supported media endpoints, using UDP.
And yep, eventually it overflowed the MTU and the phones couldn't handle the fragment reassembly.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#68Offtopic. Not sure how you're styling your links, but in a dark mode view, they are effectively illegible. https://imgur.com/a/aSbpVF8
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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#69Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?
I have one first-hand story:
I did tech support via phone for a popular consumer computer brand. One particular call, a woman reported that her computer was restarting every time someone in the house flushed the toilet.
Long story short, her home was in the back-back woods with the home powered by a generator. In addition to powering the computer, the generator was also the source of power for a water pump which would kick on to refill the toilet bowl whenever it emptied. And wouldn't you know that that water pump had a beefy coil around its motor and would brownout the entire house every time it started?
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#70Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
I had a customer who used a line of sight system for extending their network across part of a city.
I had a shortcut on my desktop with the weather for that town ready when they would inevitably call and blame our unrelated equipment for some problem.