161–170 of 331 posts
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.
Another classic: Can log in while sitting down, can't log in when standing up. I need to find the reference ... Edit: OK, here's one version: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
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.
First thing I thought of too. Anyone know if there a list of more articles similar to these three?
Some years ago I put in a point to point wifi link for a family member, from house to garage "block". I specified a pair of Ubiquity Nanostations which are tiny, PoE powered and have a decent range. The house end is inside a UK standard tiled roof - dense 3/4", allow for slat, so 1"+ thick and dense material. The other end is 20m away (LoS) and external mounting was forbidden. The garage block has foil lined Kingspan…
Most people living in large metros will never fathom how wifi will simply stop working in the suburbs. It is easy to forget that Internet cables -normally hidden in cities- are completely exposed to elements in suburbs
Lost wifi while at parent's ? Check the roof!
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.
Oh man, this is one of my favorite lines of all time: > "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--" > "Geostatisticians..." > "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."…
https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...
It's a few paragraphs, maybe too much to quote, but the bulk of it starts with:
> By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. [...] Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.
Guess who was right.
The whole essay is worth reading, if you haven't yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work in high-frequency trading. I had several tabs permanently open to the live weather radar feed for regions where we had microwave towers: the NE USA, the South of England, the Alps...
I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or did your company have towers all to itself?
A famous blog post investigating some of the towers as an outsider, at [1], will be of interest to you.
If you want to guess where they are, get a globe, find the datacentres where electronic exchanges operate (it's not a secret: Chicago, New Jersey, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Zurich...) and draw the straightest possible lines between pairs of them. Microwaves don't cross the ocean.
[0] https://www.mckay-brothers.com/
[1] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-ba...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s a fair comment. A lot of readers on HN are adept debuggers, and will start to analyze everything from the first paragraph. By burying the lede like that, it feels like wasted time, to have begun debugging before the (incredibly important) part about the unusual setup was revealed. Seems almost implausible that the protagonist, with his technical knowhow, did not think of this earlier.. Anyway, it’s a mat…
I may have just picked this comment to express overall frustration so for that I apologize. But I don't know - writing is something that comes in a flow. This wasn't some deliberate clickbaity thing by the author, they just wrote it in a way that that made sense to them. It also seems that the author themselves did not consider the setup at first, which happens, as sometimes we have tunnel vision. You may criticize h…
the alternate version of this post goes "I fixed my dad's Internet. The neighborhood's tree grew too tall and blocked the signal so I upgraded the 10 year old hardware. The end." How much less fun and interesting is that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not bragging, I'm just saying if you have one custom, specialized part in your setup that's particularly out of the ordinary and prone to failure, I'm surprised you wouldn't start there. If you're e.g. running a piece of software with a crazy custom plugin that overhauls major functionality and then an update to the base software breaks everything, it shouldn't be TOO much of a mystery on where to start looking.…
(Author here) I didn't forget, it just didn't seem like the most likely problem. Like I said in a reply to a sibling to your comment, the gear was ~10yrs old at the time and had been working fine until then. It was perched in a very inconvenient spot because it had to "look around the corner" of the building, so checking the line of sight wasn't just a case of looking out the window. I went in order of "most likely t…
This reminds me of a taxi driver in Dubrovnik, Croatia who told me that his cel service would not work when it rained because the rain changed transmissions where he lived in a way that meant that his phone would connect to a cel tower one valley over which was in Bosnia where he didn't have a data plan.
End result: your taxi driver's data plan will work whatever the weather :)