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Hacker News Hacker News- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt
- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
My grandmother's house is adjacent my parents' w/ 200 ft. between and line of sight. Back in 2013, when my grandmother moved into the then-new house, I setup a point-to-point wifi bridge between them to share my parents' Internet connection and give me easy remote support access to grandma.
Summer of 2023 visiting relatives complained the Internet service in grandma's house was slow and unreliable. There were repeated suggestions made by helpful relatives for purchasing a new WiFi router for her house, getting independent Internet service, etc.
Grandma was happy with it, and the relatives went home, so I put off looking at it. When I did finally look at it, months later (when I went over for Thanksgiving) everything seemed fine.
When the relatives came to visit in summer 2024 they complained again. I looked at it immediately and found massive packet loss on both ends.
The ornamental trees planted along the driveway between the houses were the culprit. With the leaves off (say, at Thanksgiving time) it was fine. When the relatives came to visit in the summer the trees were in full leaf and acting as very good attenuators.
The trees were newly planted when grandma moved in. I didn't even think about them getting bigger and fuller when I set up the link. They filled out in the 10 years intervening, though. (Chalk it up to me still being relatively young and not thinking about installations on 10+ year timescales when I put it up.)
Fortunately there's a room in her house with line of sight to my parents' house unobscured by trees. It meant putting the radio outside a bedroom window instead of the attic (where I'd originally stashed it), but it solved the problem and ended complaints from relatives.
My PC and the roku device were both wired to two different ports on a router (iirc an Edgerouter X running openwrt at the time). This didn't repro when the roku streamed other services (hulu/youtube tested), only netflix. This also didn't repro if the roku was connected over wireless (connecting to an AP wired to a different port). Just opening netflix also didn't repro, the roku had to be actively streaming a netflix video.
I never ended up solving it, I just worked around it by making the roku connect over wireless.
It did take me forever to figure out the problem though. For a long time I'd be in one room getting frustrated with my computer while someone was innocently watching netflix in the other room.
"Oct 2: Warning: Due to a known bug, the default Linux document viewer evince prints N*N copies of a PDF file when N copies requested. As a workaround, use Adobe Reader acroread for printing multiple copies of PDF documents, or use the fact that every natural number is a sum of at most four squares."
I've seen other references to this bug, but the workaround is the sort of thing mathematicians would come up with.
sources: https://mathoverflow.net/a/3601/143, https://math.berkeley.edu/computing/wiki/index.php?title=Sup...
Also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation
I must say, the AI-generated "stock image" doesn't add that much to the article and could be done without, especially when its alt-text contains the prompt.
I tried update my routers, tried to update my notebook wifi firmware, tryed to change the router config, the router position, the router order, the wifi channel, the wifi name and password. Nothing worked. But if I connected using linux, things would work just fine.
In the end I divorced my wife and brought a Thinkpad. She keeped the cat, the house, the routers and that dell vostro notebook.
I keeped the dog and the car.
Either the radios were misaligned and the rain was reflecting it back towards a stable link just enough to improve throughput.
Or
The rain took a bad link all the way down, failing over to a different link.
Or
The rain/wind was moving an obstruction.
I have about a million of these stories sadly.
"The internet goes down on tuesdays"
Crane.
"The internet goes out in the morning"
Temperature inversion.
How was that not the first thing to be checked ? OP must have hit themselves over the head for not thinking of that one sooner
Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.
Directional antenas are far from directional, they pick noise from everywhere.
In my opinion rain reduces that noise, and if the point to point has more than enough signal margin to keep operating at full speed, it ends up improving the link.
Something like horse blinders.
- Just rain == good internet
- Just cold == good internet
- Cold + rain == bad internet
After a lot of head scratching the provider finally sent someone with a ladder to climb the poll. What they found was that the protective boot on the coax connection was bad. When it rained for a while water would seep into the coax connector. By itself this wasn’t too bad, but if it was also cold outside it would freeze. This would then force a gap between the threads of the socket and the cable, breaking the ground connection.
Previously, the connector had been replaced, but nobody had noticed the torn boot. This tech replaced both the connector and the boot and the problem was solved! It honestly was the best interaction with the cable company I have ever had. Only returning their hardware when switching to fiber felt almost as good.
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371
Related:
We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)
After hours and hours of iterations I could get it to work perfectly, just once, for each cartridge. I would clean it a bit more, try a game, things would work great. I’d try another game and it the copyright logo would fail. So I’d clean it up a bit more. Swab the port and try it again. It worked! Then another game… nope.
I eventually realized that the isopropanol was making a weak connection work fine, and then I guess it just kept working once power was flowing.
No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to stay fixed, so I keep a handful of cotton swabs and a small dispenser of isopropanol in the carrying case. I’ll swab a cartridge before inserting it and it works every time.
So now I have a Game Boy that requires alcohol to work.
I installed the antenna in the winter. Everything worked great. In the summer, we lost a few channels. Rain in the summer and hardly anything would come in. The answer I realized, like in the article, is trees. Leaves are already full of water so they are good at attenuating signals. Leaves that are also soaked in rain doubly so.
One winter had been so cold I had Cartoon Network and other cable stations available on my terrestrial antenna. When the freezing temperatures ended, I had to buy the cable because I got used to it so much.I'm surprised WiFi can't pass on reliably through branches. Must have been a nightmare back then.
Unfortunately he hadn't even had it a week when he found he couldn't unlock it, and once he had it wouldn't start. And wouldn't you know it, it was bucketing with rain at 8pm and there he was, stuck outside the swimming pool trying to take his daughter home from her swimming club. Off it went back to the garage on a breakdown truck, while he got a rather lower-spec loaner.
Next morning it was fine. All week it was fine. Until it was time to pick his daughter up from swimming, of course.
This went on for a few weeks until eventually they tracked it down to interference with the remote fob.
Because the swimming pool was at the local community centre, in another room in the community centre was a local radio station, and they started broadcasting at 6pm every week night.
What was the first thing anyone did on coming into the studio? Turn on the UHF link from the studio to the transmitter site, on 428MHz, sufficiently close to the 433MHz receiver for the remote central locking fob to desense it and prevent it sending the immobiliser key to car's ECU.
No, no-one back in Munich believed it either.
That also took a few minutes to debug why this one coworker came back from lunch, plummeted down into his chair, and someone else's screen went out.
The fix was easy: Prune the branches. than
>The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. We replaced our old 802.11g devices with new 802.11n ones, which took advantage of new magic math and physics to make signals more resistant to interference.
The rain would move branches out of the way.
This is why experience helps. Good life and professional experience helps to short circuit many problems.
http://d.hd.org/anecdotes.html#NFS
TL;DR: kinked fibre causing large (NFS) packets to fail frequently in one direction
same computer did not start if any of its metal surfaces touched the wall, but that might have been a electrical leak - thankfully i do not live at that dump still