I don't know if this is fake, but it could be true. I had a similar situation working for a WISP around 2010. Every night, for about 10 minutes, the connections from our HQ to a relay tower became flaky. At the time we were using two Mikrotik 5GHz cards and some large antennas. You could sit in front your computer and wait, a few minutes after the sunset, for the monitoring alerts start arriving. After a week trying…
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
311–320 of 331 posts
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#312Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#313Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#314Once upon a time, I owned a 1998 Volkswagen Wolfsburg Edition, a sleek and vibrant red car that turned heads wherever I went. As a city worker, I found it convenient to park my car at the train station and commute to work. One particularly exhausting day, I trudged back from the train to the parking lot, eager to get home and unwind. As I approached my car, I noticed something peculiar—all the windows were missing. P…
The first time it happened was on a music festival after hauling a lot of camping gear from the car. I locked it using the remote key fob, put the keys into my pocket and hauled the last bunch of stuff to our camp. An hour or so later someone told me that my car had completely open windows, asking whether that was intentional. Of course it wasn't.
The next time it happened was at home, after shopping for groceries. I locked the doors, carried the box with the groceries into my flat, and when I finished unpacking them I looked out of the window and saw my car in the parking lot - with fully lowered windows. I thought it was a glitch in the firmware or whatever.
A few days later the same thing happened again - I shopped groceries, carried them in, looked out of the window - car had lowered the windows entirely by itself. The same glitch twice within a few days? In almost the same situation? How big are the chances for that?
Then it suddenly dawned on me.
I have quite a lot of stuff in my pockets. Including the car key with the remote buttons. Whenever carrying heavy stuff, boxes and such, there is quite a good chance of me accidentally pressing the "unlock" button not shortly, but for a few seconds. So I took my key fob, stood in front of the car, held down the button...and after five seconds of waiting, all of the windows lowered for just a little bit, and after waiting a few additional seconds they lowered completely.
Since then I know about an interesting feature of my car: it can remotely lower the windows for ventilation in summer.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#315Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#316Let 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.
My recent version: I was playing a pinball game in an arcade. One particular ramp shot was registering earlier in the day and then stopped working. Eventually I realized that the sensor is an optical beam, and the receiver happened to be in direct sunlight coming in through a window! So it was continuously receiving infrared and would never report the beam being blocked by a pinball. Sure enough, it started working a…
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#317Here's my own 500 mile email story. This happened to me about a year ago. Just a normal day at the office when suddenly the internet drops out, except for my machine. Everyone else has a network connection, but no internet. Except for me, I can't reach devices on the local network, but I can reach anything outside. Now, our network is not large or complicated. We have a consumer grade ONT and WiFi router provided by…
Does your machine have a cellular modem that gets prioritized only when there's no route to some well-known service via the normal network adapter? And you disabled it (but forgot to mention doing so in this story) around the same time as swapping routers?
I also was using our neighboring business's guest WiFi, but again that should have given me a sane local IP.
Every diagnostic I could think of told me I was directly connected to the WAN with no intervening networks. Then again I'm not the best at debugging networks so I could be mistaken on this point. I am 100% certain that the IP address my computer was given was not a legal local network address.
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#318Here's my own 500 mile email story. This happened to me about a year ago. Just a normal day at the office when suddenly the internet drops out, except for my machine. Everyone else has a network connection, but no internet. Except for me, I can't reach devices on the local network, but I can reach anything outside. Now, our network is not large or complicated. We have a consumer grade ONT and WiFi router provided by…
Here is mine. The admins could connect to their machines, but not to any user machine. It was winter and we had some heating issues, so I made a script "warmup_the_office.sh" that was meant to launch a "while(true){}" on each core of each PC of the office, but instead launched itself indefinitely on each and all reachable machines, exhausting all pids and preventing distant logging. We had to reboot everything by han…
Did you admit what happened, or was there a "mysterious widespread network failure"?
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you are looking at the turbines "edge-on," there's probably going to be a noticeable Doppler return as well. Plastic drones with plastic propellers are still visible on radar because the tiny propellers spin super fast, so they light up like a Christmas tree on Doppler radar because the approaching vs receding velocities of the blades are so different.
Any chance you can explain to this idiot (me) the flaw in my thinking? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903084
Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
My parents’ house was connected to old copper phone lines from ca. 1940, and by the 1980s rain intrusion from long or heavy storms would cause massive static on the line (made worse when squirrels ran on the line). This was disastrous when I got my first modem ca 1986. Just unusable until it dried out.
Interesting! This was a relatively new apartment building in Hollywood with similarly aged cable — maybe he was right and I'm altogether wrong. They ran the cable up through vertically adjacent units as well which left you at some degree of mercy of your downstairs neighbors.