Comment by hbn
2 years ago
The unusual internet setup is pretty important information to bury a few paragraphs in. Once that was explained it seemed like they should have started by checking nothing was blocking the antenna before tediously running around plugging the laptop into things and following cables and checking power supplies on the networking equipment?
Hindsight is 20/20 but I correctly guessed the ending as soon as that information was added.
I thought the same, although I probably would not have immediately gone to the Wifi transmitter.
After a couple decades of debugging various internet issues the first thing I now do is check the 'source' works (i.e. plug a laptop into the modem directly, but with a different cable). If that works I go down 'the line' until something does not work. That usually finds the culprit quite quickly (and also stops me from messing with my router config when it's an ISP issue).
In OPs scenario, the moment you realise that the office internet is working fine and it's only the home internet that is having issues, the connection between the two would have been the obvious place to look next.
That being said, it's still a fun story, and still quite 'unexpected' that rain could be the determinating factor on whether you'll have working internet or not.
I felt the same, but to be fair to the author, the information was probably buried in the back of their mind too - when you've had a set up like this for years, many of its details become invisible to yourself, part of "obvious" background information that your mind doesn't bother bringing to the forefront.
Sure, but the title has you thinking "Why would this external weather event effect my in-home wifi?" when the answer is "because I have a weird thing outside of my house that makes the wifi work". I feel used.
As soon as he described the physical setup I was screaming "Tree!" internally.
Yes, it was IMHO too buried in the article.
At first (without the full context) I thought it was because rain blocked the external signal interference that was making the AP channel look busy.
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I think it’s a fair comment. A lot of readers on HN are adept debuggers, and will start to analyze everything from the first paragraph. By burying the lede like that, it feels like wasted time, to have begun debugging before the (incredibly important) part about the unusual setup was revealed.
Seems almost implausible that the protagonist, with his technical knowhow, did not think of this earlier..
Anyway, it’s a matter of storytelling, and that matters!
I may have just picked this comment to express overall frustration so for that I apologize.
But I don't know - writing is something that comes in a flow. This wasn't some deliberate clickbaity thing by the author, they just wrote it in a way that that made sense to them.
It also seems that the author themselves did not consider the setup at first, which happens, as sometimes we have tunnel vision.
You may criticize his abilities I guess, although overall it just felt like an account of things as they happened to the author, not considering how someone might be trying to guess things once they publish it.
So yeah, I don't know, I just feel like there's too much negativity sometimes. But maybe I overreacted.
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I'm not bragging, I'm just saying if you have one custom, specialized part in your setup that's particularly out of the ordinary and prone to failure, I'm surprised you wouldn't start there.
If you're e.g. running a piece of software with a crazy custom plugin that overhauls major functionality and then an update to the base software breaks everything, it shouldn't be TOO much of a mystery on where to start looking. When you add weird custom parts to a system, it tends to be a point of failure.
Perhaps the author just didn't remember that they had a custom setup like that, but it wasn't framed in the article like "suddenly I remembered...", it was just stated as a given. And the fact that it was giving them particularly high speed home internet access for the time, it'd be a kind hard thing to forget?
(Author here) I didn't forget, it just didn't seem like the most likely problem.
Like I said in a reply to a sibling to your comment, the gear was ~10yrs old at the time and had been working fine until then. It was perched in a very inconvenient spot because it had to "look around the corner" of the building, so checking the line of sight wasn't just a case of looking out the window.
I went in order of "most likely to be the problem, weighted by how easy they were to check." This is a debugging strategy that has served me well, and I don't regret using it that time either.
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Yes, it’s not a competition, but if you have a line of sight network connection and the network only works when it’s raining, the obvious thing to check is that line of sight.
(Author here)
I didn't think to check the line of sight because I was primed by the fact the bridge had been running fine for 10 years. With networking gear that old, it seemed more likely that a device/cable/power brick had just gone bad with age.
Also, the antenna is on some metal scaffolding propped out 6ft past the edge of our balcony, because it needs to "look around the corner" of the building. It's 30ft in the air, and checking the line of sight involved climbing up there. It certainly wasn't the easiest nor the likeliest thing to check, so I didn't check it first.
Multiple people in the comments just here on HN have mentioned having weird situations caused by routers that had gone bad. I imagine most of their routers weren't 10 years old when they started acting up. How old is your router?
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There’s troubleshooting and then there’s the troubleshooting of the troubleshooting post-mortem. GP is just doing the latter.