31–38 of 38 posts
I used to have a dell vostro notebook that every time I logged into the network with windows, it would drop every other device on the wifi. Funny thing, is that if I used linux, the router would be alright and not collapse. Never found out the reason. In the end I divorced the wife and she got that notebook. Wifi is weird.
That seems like a pretty extreme solution to that problem.
That post has provided no proof this is indeed a MAC address conflict issue, and as other comments suggest even an actual MAC address duplicate should only cause connectivity issues for said MAC address and no other devices. MAC addresses belong to the NIC and not the machine, and while the OS can override them, it won't do so without express user intervention. I'm especially skeptical of the Ethernet MAC being a dup…
It's the people who thought Ethernet Pause was ever a good idea.
I've only seen it lead to tears. In all of the situations I've run into, it would be better to drop packets that are arriving too fast to handle than to try to fix it up by trying to do flow control. Ethernet is unreliable, and packet loss is the overload signal; PAUSE changes overload from drop to buffer, and then you end up with problems with overlarge buffers. In addition to things like where a multi-queue nic has one queue overloaded and sends PAUSE, which results in starvation for the other queues; or PAUSE getting broadcast over a switch when it shouldn't have been, etc.
I've experienced a similar situation where a USB-C hub would bring down everything connected to the switch, but only when it was disconnected from the laptop. No clue how this stuff makes it out of the factory...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Macintoshes "remember" the most recent IP they were given on a network rather than always doing a DHCP. It's one of the reasons given for why people say Macs "feel better" e.g. you sit down in a room with a friend who has a Dell. Your Mac gets WiFi almost immediately while they have to wait a few seconds even though both of you have been on this network before. One of the benefits of owning the stack all th…
Except that it breaks other people in busy networks. Fuck everyone else my WiFi feels good.
My experience: 95% of all network problems are dodgy cables. The other 5% is dodgy switches. The switches one is a bear to debug. I just tossed out two old switches, because I wasn't sure which one was the one that polluted the network. I could have spent several hours, setting up little sandboxes, but it was easier just to toss them both, and get new ones.
That post has provided no proof this is indeed a MAC address conflict issue, and as other comments suggest even an actual MAC address duplicate should only cause connectivity issues for said MAC address and no other devices. MAC addresses belong to the NIC and not the machine, and while the OS can override them, it won't do so without express user intervention. I'm especially skeptical of the Ethernet MAC being a dup…
I would go on a walk and every time the missus would call me to tell that the network is down again...