Troubleshooting the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Troubleshooting the Internet

blog.mozilla.org

22 pointsXioNoX6 comments

At Rackspace - some time ago, I can't speak for now - the most common phone call we received was:

  "My site's down!"

Ninety-some percent of the time, the customer's internet was down, or the internet in their country was down, or they were in Europe and the Sprint link across the Atlantic was down, or there was a problem with DNS.

There's a notorious video of one of the founders, barefoot, teaching a class about DNS for the relatively non-technical folks we hired for first-level support triage.

This would be a great supplement, the moral of the story being, these days, if you support any service on the internet, you support every internet service provider that exists. ;)

Sad to see speedtest.net instead of http://speedof.me -- an HTML5 speed test that doesn't need flash and works cross-platform.

First time I hear about that tool, thanks! I'll start testing it.

A majority of cafe and other public area wifi routers do not have client isolation, so one way to deal with congestion on these networks is to connect to them and then do some arp poisoning to turn your favorite Android-based device into everyone's new router, and then selectively kill the worst bandwidth hogs. "There's an app for that", as they say.

...at least, that's what I've heard.

Android offers a surprisingly good toolbox for diagnosing and abusing wireless networks.

I faced wifi congestion/over lap at my office so had to finally shift to LAN.

Is there anyone hassle free solution to deal with wifi signal overlapping problem?

> Is there anyone hassle free solution to deal with wifi signal overlapping problem?

Nope. I joke with a friend of mine that does desktop IT (to the extent it still exists :/) that you can find the CTO at any startup because it's the guy walking around with a laptop obviously troubleshooting wifi problems.

Everyone who can should wire in, so that everyone who can't has some available bandwidth. Intel have apparently been working on tech for some time that would allow mac addresses to hop wifi / wired, but I don't expect that to be viable in the near future.

In other news, the frequency with which I have worked in an office that has 50mbit comcast business - the same link I have at home - for upwards of a hundred people is nontrivial.

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