fratermus

between 2AM and 6AM internet would start dropping packets like crazy

about 20 years ago I was remotely troubleshooting a microwave connectivity problem that occurred at a clients workplace about 10pm each night. Lasted about an hour. There was no one at work then but data transfers between their server and the mothership would fail.

One night the client went to the site at night to check an alarm and noticed there was a bobtail truck parked next to the building. The aero deflector attachment on its roof blocked line-of-sight with the tower, causing the problem. He asked the driver to nap at some other location in the parking lot and the problem went away.

I feel crazy for thinking it is correlated to do bad weather, as if that should somehow affect my indoor WiFi quality…

well, if it’s raining more people might stay indoors on their wifi, exacerbating any channel interference problems

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I’ve been trending toward Debian for everything.

I’m honestly regularly shocked at how many people use Chrome on Linux. I generally prefer to run firefox (ESR) on my debian machines. But I regularly open a couple dozen tabs during a research session and sometimes FF eats eat all my RAM (16GB), then swap, then locks up the machine. If I catch the degradation before lockup sometimes I can kill enough tabs to recover. I had a few of those lockups last month before I got tired of it. So for now I’ve swapped back to chromium to get around that problem. Same behavior on my part, ~same extensions, but chromium’s RAM usage stays sane.

for the first time someone has contributed to the code. This may seem trivial, but it is important to me I’d definitely feel good about that!

I just don’t make a habit of visiting any particular website to read it. That’s what the threadiverse is for. Alternatively: that’s what RSS is for.