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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

What taught me the most about this was managing my parents' home internet from a distance. If it went out, they could hardly even communicate with me to fix it. I quickly learned just how many things can go wrong with Ubiquiti wifi APs or other more advanced tools sitting there.

The final working setup: Basic ISP-provided modem/router/wifi combo, cheap near-zero-config wifi APs to reach distant rooms, entire setup on a lamp timer to cut power for 30min a day at 4AM. The thing is, that solution is decent even if you understand the more advanced stuff.

Now at work I see how many SWEs are, in a way, too smart for their own good. I keep telling them, make your solutions less galaxy-brained. No you are not making another custom DBMS-type thing just to serve a few kinds of requests from adjacent systems. If random other people can't understand it, it'll get rewritten in 2 years tops.

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> The final working setup: Basic ISP-provided modem/router/wifi combo

And imagine how many person-hours went into making that remotely manageable, when unlike you, they control both ends of the connection!

I have my ISP’s hardware in dumb bridge mode because otherwise it won’t do what I want. And all the things they block or cripple? I firmly believe they were right to do so — few people want to do the weirdo stuff I want.

Like you, I set my parents’ setup to the generic defaults.

I'm curious what kind of stuff they block or cripple that you're interested in. I don't think I've ever run into such a limitation with my Comcast internet. Granted, I have other issues with Comcast, but none of the nature you speak of.

Maybe port forwarding for L2TP, which uses weird non-TCP/UDP protocols.

Yep, also some legacy incoming ftp

I'm a big fan of straight out of the box solutions. I make a point of starting projects often and from a clean slate and learning to use the tools in their default config. If defaults aren't good, change tooling. Customization is super fun but it's just another layer of complexity at the end of the day.

I love that fresh VM smell...

Every time people say that you need to first install 30 pluggins before you can use gnome I just think “uh no, you don’t. It works just fine out of the box.”

Rather than turning a bunch of preferences and habits in to hard requirements, I prefer to just go with the flow. If the gnome design team says workspaces are now horizontal instead of vertical, I just go with it instead of building a plug-in or fork to turn them vertical again.

Same with Apple products, they are designed well, so just go with it.

I'd trust Apple's design changes over Gnome's.

Same, I don't mess with desktop GNU/Linux in general. Headless Linux VMs and servers make sense of course.

I’ve heard this called “the defaults lifestyle” on the Software Defined Talk podcast. I’m forever locked out of nirvana because I have an iPhone but not a Mac, but that’s fine.

Occasionally plugins are worth the expense though. I finally discovered Argos[0] and I’m using it to show time in UTC and a couple other time zones. Super handy.

But if I try some new software and find that I have to tweak it a bunch to make it usable, that means the devs have different aesthetics and I should probably try something else.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/

> Every time people say that you need to first install 30 pluggins before you can use gnome I just think “uh no, you don’t. It works just fine out of the box.”

Emacs enthusiasts seem to be the same way: oh, it’s so configurable that let me recommend you do all these crazy things just to get started.

Default setup (absolutely no customization) works great for newbies right out of the box.

(And I say this as someone who’s been using emacs for over 45 years; it’s still my daily drive for editing, web browsing, mail reading… but a beginner doesn’t need to know any of that)

I had this revelation around 15 years ago. I was fiddling with custom i3wm setups and complex hotkey setups and my .emacs was longer than some short stories. I even had Windows with a custom explorer replacement that re-did the whole UI.

At some point I figured out that I spent so much time configuring everything at home, but I couldn't do the same for the other multiple computers I used at work (work machine + remoting to client's computers) and that started to grate on me.

I just gave up on customising and started using everything pretty much on the default settings. Haven't regretted it at all.

The only "custom" bits I have is a homeshick[0] setup and a Brewfile that install some basic shell tools for me on a new computer.

[0] https://github.com/andsens/homeshick

I'm with you. If I can't either take the custom config with me (.emacs, for instance), and it goes beyond a few simple things, like changing a couple of defaults on OSX, I just don't mess with it anymore. It's not worth the overhead of either having to use an unfamiliar configuration in other contexts or having to spend the time to completely reimplement my custom tweaks again (which might not even be possible due to IT policies).

> At some point I figured out that I spent so much time configuring everything at home, but I couldn't do the same for the other multiple computers I used at work (work machine + remoting to client's computers) and that started to grate on me.

I get the best of both worlds with nix and home-manager.

if i don't like the defaults in an application i tend to look for alternative apps that have better defaults before grudgingly changing the defaults in this app. i just don't like spending a lot of time fiddling with settings.

the hallmark of good application design is to have defaults that are good for the majority of users and don't require fiddling to become useful.

just recently i decided to look for a better way to switch windows in gnome. alt-tab is not convenient because the window previews are to small. the activities overview was a little bit better but slow because i had to use the mouse (i just found i can use arrow-keys too, but it's a bit awkward).

so i went out to search for an extension that would let me cycle through the full sized windows. that let me stumble over a comment that pointed out that i could do that without an extension but with alt-esc.

look ma, no extension. defaults for the win.

> Customization is super fun but it's just another layer of complexity at the end of the day.

Feel like this often is a recipe for fragility too. I used to be big into customizing a linux environment and editors/IDEs for personal use, but often turned into an enormous time sink when troubleshooting would be required just to maintain usability.

Yeah, I constantly heard people at work complaining about whatever minute changes broke their ultra-customized workflows. Past tense cuz they got laid off.

I hate the rewrite treadmill. I'm dealing with this now. One of the APIs we use is migrating to a different API. Of course they completely changed the data structure. So now we have to rewrite entire components (they don't want a service layer to restructure the data), there's nobody left from the original team that wrote it, and the only requirements we have are "make it work like it did with the old API". Surprise surprise, we have a lot of bugs showing up in prod.

This is how you burnout people - have people do boring yet frustrating work, make them do it the hard way, then put them on a deadline with other competing priorities.

The only way to get off the rewrite treadmill is to have a good API. Half of ours suck because people focus more on the implementation details, also caring more about unit tests than integration tests when it should be the other way around. Similarly, those failing to see the value of a good API end up deprecating it for no reason.

We had zero say in most of the APIs we use. When I started demanding clients take part in our API design, they were pleasantly surprised.

> This is how you burnout people - have people do boring yet frustrating work, make them do it the hard way, then put them on a deadline with other competing priorities.

The last two years of my life.

I've been burnt out for the last 5 years.

> I quickly learned just how many things can go wrong with Ubiquiti wifi APs

I recently got started with Ubiquiti and haven't run into any problems myself. Do you have any examples you could pass on?

I know I was much happier with their stuff from 2014 thru 2016 or so. Quality and value has tanked.

I don't remember the specifics from that long ago, but basically they're too complicated. I didn't even get the settings right the first time, and it was too confusing for my parents to log in and fix things if needed. There was also some weirdness with needing a Ubiquiti account that I'm told you could avoid, but why is it even a thing.

Sounds like you got past those parts already.

Indeed. Treating every topic as something I should get my mother to do over the phone while driving gives wonderful results. It improves communication, documentation, code, stacks and logistics.

What cheap, near-zero config wifi APs have worked well for you? I'm looking for something simpler than ubiquiti for my house.

Lol, the ones there don't even have a brand name, so I don't remember what they're called. MAC address manufacturer field just resolved to "Shenzhen," a city in China.

There are tons on Amazon etc that do basically the same thing.

Off-topic, but why do you cut the power at 4AM?

I guess it's to reboot the internet infra and renew IP lease and nobody in the house is likely to be using the internet at 4AM.

ISP provided equipment will stop working if not restarted regularly.

The wifi APs too. And not "will" stop working but "might, and if so I won't be around to reboot it." Also regularly tests that stuff will return to health after a real power outage, and that nothing is depending on ephemeral state like DHCP leases. Basically, I want to experience the same circumstances during the week I'm visiting that they're going to experience for months after.

Ubiquiti APs failed this test. The moment one started an OTA update, my mom temp unplugged it to make room for a blender. It soft-bricked itself. Parents couldn't figure out how to reconfigure it after a hard reset.

Tbf, I'm fairly certain that if you unplug an AIO in the middle of an update, it will also brick.

I usually SOIC clip/backup the firmware on Ubiquity and other devices we own, before doing anything like this (more recently). Its usually so much faster and reliable than an RMA in most cases for a simple firmware update fail, especially with the post pandemic supply chain the way its been.

Took awhile to get the approval but when you have a large pile of RMAs sitting for 6mo to a year due to a bad firmware update, for only a standard 1-2 year limited warranty, and they stop responding, and replacements were back-ordered for ages. Well, you do what you have to.

That's the trick, the dumb wifi APs don't update.

Why was the AP plugged in the kitchen anyway? =)

For wifi in the kitchen. The walls have wire mesh that happens to block RF really badly, so wifi will only work in the same room. If internet went down, house was also a cell dead zone so nobody could talk to me while looking at the router or something.

That's very common, do you know the general why?

Usually the power brick is poorly isolated and/or you have dirty electricity, it results in errors on an ongoing basis that get logged to the small amount of onboard memory. (not usually a circular buffer.)

When the errors have sufficient volume the memory fills up, and it stops working at resource exhaustion.

In a real pinch, I've resolved this in some of the more milder cases by simply using one of those walmart plug timers that turns off for a few minutes in the morning when everyone is asleep.

Well, at least they were on UPS and got power conditioning that way. But there's also just crappy programming. It's not only ISP-provided stuff, it's cheap home routers in general. I don't trust them.

As always, there's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1495/

Interestingly, this thread, and your XKCD link, have given me a solution to my own problem - with a Nighthawk travel router.

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