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The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#321

Post by hunter2_ »

neon5077 wrote: post #317
hunter2_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope! Only WiFi and Ethernet. I had been using my phone hotspot, but that gives me a sane IP in the local reserved block, not one from the public block. 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…

Very interesting! Some kind of buggy DMZ type of thing, perhaps, where even the DHCP traffic flowed right on through... who knows.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#322

Post by neon5077 »

hunter2_ wrote: post #321
neon5077 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! Only WiFi and Ethernet. I had been using my phone hotspot, but that gives me a sane IP in the local reserved block, not one from the public block. 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…

Very interesting! Some kind of buggy DMZ type of thing, perhaps, where even the DHCP traffic flowed right on through... who knows.

That's about the only thing that makes any sense. Maybe it somehow faulted to route all traffic straight to the ONT, which could only give one address which I happened to get. And then the fiber got cut the very next day around the same time as we got the new router.

A lot of coincidences and extraordinary edge cases, but it's plausible I guess?

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#323

Post by gerdesj »

robocat wrote: post #267
phyzome wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was subterfuge required? Something is missing from this story.

If you are renting then you might not be allowed to install an aerial on the building. There are situations where you need council permission to install an aerial or it may be forbidden e.g. listed historic buildings. Also see: https://www.townplanning.info/permitted-development/househol... Just what I found doing a quick search.

My gorgeous sister in law laid down some initial constraints, back in the day. My initial solution worked (just) and was good enough.

It failed later and me and my brother may have conspired a little bit ...

Dealing with your nearest and dearest can be quite tricky. I think we got this right ... this time!

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#324

Post by koyote »

tomaskafka wrote: post #278
koyote wrote: post #195

One of my most recent 'weird internet issues' was when I upgraded our 50mbit internet connection to 100Mbit and my laptop never really reached 100Mbit whereas my homelab easily got 100Mbit on speed tests. It took me a while to realise the difference was that the homelab was physically connected and the laptop was using Wifi. The laptop wifi was connected to the AP at ~1.2 Gbit and a different machine had the same iss…

Dtto for video cables - once you get into 1440p/4k and high frequency rates or VBR, that HDMI 2.1 or DP 1.4 certifications start to actually matter. What is worse is that the hardware tries hard to make it work even with noncompliant cable resulting in things like random flashes of black, or multiple random reconnections after plugging in the laptop.

Great, now you've got me checking our HDMI cables :) Is there an easy way to check what an HDMI cable supports?

I guess the same question stands for USB cables. I remember looking into that a while ago but did not find anything conclusive.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#325

Post by jonhohle »

bombcar wrote: post #106
jonhohle wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It was the old switch in the new dock; which was why I was going insane. Both worked in the dock, but only the OLED worked outside the dock. Had to sit down and think about it for awhile before I realized it had to be the firewall blocking access somehow.

Haha, your OP said “old”, probably autocorrected. I thought, “OLED is new, not old!”

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#326

Post by heyoni »

cortesoft wrote: post #311
nunesvn wrote: post #219

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…

I am just surprised that line of sight issues weren't the first thing checked when you have a bespoke line of sight networking setup, especially when there was no local packet loss.

That whole article felt oddly empty. Like you could read the title and conclusion and be totally fine and satisfied.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#328

Post by jffhn »

neon5077 wrote: post #318
jffhn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What a gloriously dumb idea. If I had that sort of access, I'd probably try something similar, and probably get the same results. Did you admit what happened, or was there a "mysterious widespread network failure"?

The mystery didn't last long, and no problem to admit it, I maybe even contacted them. I guess they put safeguards after that, but I didn't try again to check ;)

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#330

Post by rvba »

obi1kenobi wrote: post #200
Uehreka wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds fake I don’t think so. I definitely know tech people who get a particular idea in their head and will debug it to hell and back before taking a step back and realizing the obvious thing they missed. I’ve definitely done it before myself. > Also why not lay a cable. It sounds like they were trying to run a network between two properties that weren’t adjacent. They may not have had permission from the neigh…

(Author here) Across several city blocks, in fact, and longer than the max range of Ethernet on normal (Cat 5/5e/6) cables. Past ~300ft/100m, you need a repeater even for Ethernet. We would have needed at least one repeater somewhere along the line, which adds even more cost and complexity on top of needing to get permits from the city and approvals from all the neighbors in between. Anyone that says "just go get a p…

You omitted to answer the question why the equipment wasnt simply put higher.
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