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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

#211

Post by _nivlac_ »

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…

I'm getting confused reading your first sentence based on the rest of your comment; should homelab and laptop be swapped?

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

#212

Post by koyote »

_nivlac_ wrote: post #211
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…

I'm getting confused reading your first sentence based on the rest of your comment; should homelab and laptop be swapped?

I don't think so (but I am a bit tired today, so maybe something I wrote makes no sense :)).

Homelab is physically connected to the router whereas the laptop is connected via Wifi. It was the cable from the Wifi AP to the router that was dodgy which caused the issue.

I noticed because the laptop would never reach 'true' 100Mbit download speeds whereas the homelab did.

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

#213

Post by stavros »

fabatka wrote: post #65
asadhaider wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39898272

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

#216

Post by none_to_remain »

dmurray wrote: post #113
duxup wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 used to be in an adjacent field and we used to joke about when the HFT guys were gonna get working on some neutrino detectors & sources to signal straight through the Earth. You could use them for science on the weekends!

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

#217

Post by obi1kenobi »

numpad0 wrote: post #215
jboogie77 wrote: post #181

Why does this sound like it was written by AI?

Human writing with short context window can sound like AI too

(Author here) The image is AI generated. I did not use any AI to write the post itself.

That's just my style of writing, you can check my pre-GPT posts and compare if you'd like.

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

#218

Post by gleenn »

none_to_remain wrote: post #216
dmurray wrote: post #113

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 used to be in an adjacent field and we used to joke about when the HFT guys were gonna get working on some neutrino detectors & sources to signal straight through the Earth. You could use them for science on the weekends!

Sounds awesome, to be able to send a signal directly through the whole earth from point to point. It also sounds like origin story of X-Men or a new cancer

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

#219

Post by nunesvn »

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 everything, including changing hardware (to the same specs), I was very disappointed with the thing and got out to smoke around the sunset.

Then some huge lamps we had around the building switched on, based on a light sensor. Immediately I received the SMS alerts on my phone. I ran into the building, turned off the external lights and bingo: 0% packet loss.

It turns out that the building management had changed all of external lamps the week before, with new sodium-vapor bulbs. And for some reason, on the first 5 to 10 minutes with these lights on, it caused very high interference on the 5GHz band.

Changed the lamps, problem solved.

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

#220

Post by devilbunny »

takinola wrote: post #99
ranie93 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if some kind of jammer is running in that area. Reminds me of a similar story: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5672762/man-faces-48000-fi... Weird that even a wired connection does not work. Stay curious!

My first thought as well was there could be something emitting an intense signal in the vicinity that is interfering with the connection. However, there does not seem to be anything nearby (like I said, it is on a bridge going over a lake).

This isn’t your problem, but I had a 1994 Pontiac Bonneville whose trunk release signal was triggered by some kind of radio signal that was part of a reasonably common system (security? Anyway, this was late 90s). If I parked in certain locations (certain stores) my trunk was guaranteed to open. It was sometimes so bad that I would have to start the car, set the parking brake, shift to neutral (any gear other than park blocked the remote trunk release), close the trunk, and only then get back in, release the parking brake, and drive off. Otherwise I didn’t have enough time to start the car and get in gear before the trunk opened again.

As a practical solution, I used a short bungee cord to keep it from opening far enough to be obvious, and never kept anything of value in the trunk if the car would be unattended.

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