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Comment by singular | Hacker News Reader

I have had an issue both with my previous mac, a second gen air and a first gen pro retina with sustaining a connection (I am immediately next to the wifi router and get wifi drop outs yet my colleague, a distance away using a PC, has no dropouts whatsoever.)

I also have a curious problem that has affected both of them - if I rest the laptop on my naked chest, the wifi connection degrades to the point that connectivity is significantly affected, and if the signal is not strong enough completely drops out. Seems to me to be related to the aluminium case. Quite frustrating as this is (an arguably not very healthy) common use case for me :)

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I ended up running a script on launch that pings 127.0.0.1 every 5 seconds - my Wifi was disconnecting every few minutes and this has fixed the problem for the last 6 months for me.

edit: actually pinging the router, 192.168.1.1 etc. Script is:

#! /bin/sh

ping 192.168.1.1 > /dev/null 2>&1

That makes no sense what so ever.

Pinging your loopback address just shows that your localhost is still there.

If you were to write a script that instead pulled the local IPv4 address you are getting - that might be a little more sensical?

On Linux, that packet wouldn't leave the device either. You have to ping another host on your subnet or the kernel won't queue the packet for transmission on a hardware network interface.

Interesting, will give that a go when next I notice it happening (it's intermittent for me too which is good + bad... hard to repro :)

1) Have you tested moving away from the AP/router? I'd suggest that if you can pin it down to a specific situation, you can a) give the "Geniuses®" something to repair and/or b) find a workaround that works for you.

2) Have you forgotten about the metal plate in your chest? ;-)

I get exactly the same thing with the chest. But put it on a blanket and it overheats. Arg.

Finally! Somebody who shares my pain! :-)

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