101–110 of 331 posts
Let 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.
[0] magic-story
Similar but opposite story: 20ish years ago I hung out in an IRC channel in which, during autumn/winter months, one person would frequently get disconnected and when he came back complained about foggy weather. He had a laser line or sight connection. It could handle rain (with some degradation), but thick fog killed it.
They were rigging a servomechanism to automatically aim the antenna and wanted to write the control software in Chicken Scheme (for whatever reason, never questioned because Chicken is fun).
I have a hard time believing this. Wifi can go through multiple walls. And if these were directional P2P links, they can easily go through and even around trees, I've deployed them in the past and they don't need perfect line of sight. Granted the equipment could have been cheap, but this sounds questionable. He's asserting that the a few leaves at the top of a tree were blocking it when it wasn't raining? Idk.
Reminds 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…
The unusual internet setup is pretty important information to bury a few paragraphs in. Once that was explained it seemed like they should have started by checking nothing was blocking the antenna before tediously running around plugging the laptop into things and following cables and checking power supplies on the networking equipment? Hindsight is 20/20 but I correctly guessed the ending as soon as that information…
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Seems almost implausible that the protagonist, with his technical knowhow, did not think of this earlier..
Anyway, it’s a matter of storytelling, and that matters!
I had one recently - old Nintendo switch; worked fine when docked, couldn't get an internet connection on wifi. Turns out it had been so long that the wifi MAC was picking up a DHCP address that was blocked at the firewall; the dock had its own MAC so it got a good address.
Were you using an Ethernet adapter? The original switch dock has a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter and USB hub. It doesn’t do anything with networking. The OLED dock adds ethernet (and therefore a second MAC).
Had to sit down and think about it for awhile before I realized it had to be the firewall blocking access somehow.
I have a hard time believing this. Wifi can go through multiple walls. And if these were directional P2P links, they can easily go through and even around trees, I've deployed them in the past and they don't need perfect line of sight. Granted the equipment could have been cheap, but this sounds questionable. He's asserting that the a few leaves at the top of a tree were blocking it when it wasn't raining? Idk.
But sometimes for direct links you set the modulation, power and data rate fixed. The end result is that changing channel conditions can turn the link from 'working perfectly' to 'not working at all'
I have a hard time believing this. Wifi can go through multiple walls. And if these were directional P2P links, they can easily go through and even around trees, I've deployed them in the past and they don't need perfect line of sight. Granted the equipment could have been cheap, but this sounds questionable. He's asserting that the a few leaves at the top of a tree were blocking it when it wasn't raining? Idk.
I'm the author. Among other things, it's a distance problem -- WiFi can go through walls when the router is right there. But distance attenuates the signal as distance squared, and in this case we're talking about hundred+ yards/meters instead of just a couple.
I own a Ford Focus and to this day I don't understand why sometimes the gear shifts make this cracking noise when decelerating to zero, but only when it is raining.
My garage door opener works much better when it’s raining and also at night. I’m out case, our solar inverter (or one or more of the optimizers at the panels) creates enough noise to interfere. I also believe our microwave is adding noise to the same circuit our WiFi router is on. Despite using 5GHz, WiFi is severely degraded whenever the microwave is on.
If the router gets enough energy the "sine wave" of the radio signal starts to flatten out at the top and bottom and becomes a rounded off square wave which we call "clipping". This has the original frequency component, but also a ton of other frequency components that push up into much higher frequency bands like 5GHz.
Fun fact, this is why electric guitars add a high pitch scratchy noise, they're reaching the distortion/clipping threshold of their amplifier.