Live data from Hacker News

Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

meter.com

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#81

I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this. People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then forget that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.

From the first to the last day I worked in computer networking I encountered otherwise capable people who thought that if they randomly rebooted things… the problem was with the last thing they rebooted before “it worked again”.

It was an endless discussion about how restarting things can have second order effects, including impacting the equipment that really was the cause.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#82
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has gotta be some sort of HN meme at this point but... NixOS gives you this (with the tradeoff of course of a really steep learning curve and very opinionated packaging structure)!

Tbh in the hypothetical scenario where all of a company's configuration were handled via nix, you'd be staring at tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of company-custom .nix files where one single line might cause the bug you are encountering.

Right, but at least anyone could look into it in the company repo, instead of needing to poke at the actual machine (or an image of it)

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#83
post #4

Please don't recommend people pipe curl output to a shell. Yikes.

Wait until you find out nearly every modern package manager installs stuff directly from github repos.

I see this a lot and it really rubs me the wrong way, but it makes a lot of sense from a usability standpoint.

I started pointing directly at the full commit SHA of the version I want to use when pointing dependencies at Github repos, as I have some naïve belief that it'll offer me a reasonable level of protection from the malicious takeover of a repo.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#85
post #60

I do encounter weird Wi-Fi issues on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Not sure if it is related to this bug. Sometimes I am just unable to load any web pages, but I can ping those sites. I have to reboot it regularly to reconnect to the internet. The issue is most likely to occur after waking from sleep. The issue is so bad that I have to fall back to a Hackintosh at home. I originally was using an Intel-based WiFi card is gre…

I use to get that issue a few years ago. Drove me up the wall.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#87

I really don’t like that the page asks users to blindly curl and execute a script that then curl and executes another script all to run a one line `ifconfig` command. Why not just share the command?

while true; do if ifconfig awdl0 |grep -q "----------------

LOL

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear I really wish there were a way to output an entire OS's "diff" from default settings. Every preference pane, every terminal setting, every changed system file. So that you could both discover, in cases like this, what's changed -- but also simply so you could export your settings in a space-efficient way and (selectively) re-import on a new OS install.

I don't know why people are dismissing this as non-viable or complex. For example, a typical Windows deployment is 15-20GB after being extracted from an ISO image that's essentially static. There's monthly updates, which are also monolithic multi-GB patches that wholesale replace system files. This is basically like a Docker image, but with the Kernel and drivers included in the base layer... .. but without any of th…

This is especially true on macOS Catalina or later with SIP enabled. The entire operating system is mounted read-only [1] and your local changes are effectively contained within your user directory.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#89
I was the IT manager for an all-Apple school, had just joined in 2014. First time overseeing that many users. New macOS and iOS versions came out. Hey guys, everyone can update! New versions out! Cool beans!

For half a year, it was WiFi and AirDrop hell. Update after update, it didn't matter, the issues were not being fixed. Finally, whichever update it was, fixed it 6 months later. I referred to it as the WiFi Apocalypse of 2014. After that, I always emailed everyone at the beginning of the school year to not install new versions of macOS and iOS when they came out. I would say that if they went against my recommendations and installed anyway, no guarantee that we'd be able to fix any problems they had, and this was their warning, so no complaining.

I would usually send an email about half a year later saying that people can update now if they like. I didn't care whether or not it looked fine within the first month or so. Never again. The WiFi Apocalypse of 2014 was hell. It's weird that this situation seems to be repeating itself.

Re: Recent Apple updates leading to WiFi issues?

#90
post #59

I’ve been noticing this for a while. Both my laptop and my wife’s have this problem. Both are M1. Both our iPhones seem to have similar issues. I went mad trying to figure it out with my router/APs etc. I was certain there is no way it could be Apple’s issue. But in hindsight this makes sense. Especially so, if Apple is sharing some driver logic between M1 laptops and A16 SOCs on the phones. Edit: I want to add that…

AWDL steals time from your Wi-Fi connection; it doesn’t drop requests.

More specifically, it tells your router to hold packets for a few milliseconds while it switches to another channel, then switches back and signals to resume sending. Unless you are saturating your wifi network from a single apple device this should nit be an issue.

AWDL has been around since, what, 2014? There may be new bugs but it’s hard to believe the principle stopped working as wifi got faster.

Post reply on HN