[HN Gopher] Diagnosing an Unusual WiFi Issue (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
Diagnosing an Unusual WiFi Issue (2020)
Author : llimllib
Score : 252 points
Date : 2025-01-02 16:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ryuuta.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ryuuta.net)
| Johnny555 wrote:
| >First, I purchased a new, highly-reviewed, wifi adapter on
| Amazon.
|
| This is not how you find a high quality product on Amazon.
|
| >It didn't resolve the issue. It did, however, come with an offer
| for a free 64GB flash drive in exchange for a good reviews.
|
| Now you know why it was so highly reviewed.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Now you know why it was so highly reviewed.
|
| I'm relatively certain that was indeed what the author meant to
| imply.
| generalizations wrote:
| Usually, you can see a few comments mentioning those offers
| when you check the reviews. Amazon lets you go see just the
| 1-star reviews; this is a good use for that feature.
| jchw wrote:
| It's interesting how it's actually really easy to notice
| this happening as a random consumer (I've seen it a few
| times, in fact) but somehow impossible for Amazon to do
| anything about, and presumably when they do they don't
| bother putting in much effort to properly punish sellers
| for it. It's almost like Amazon does not give a shit.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Part of my falling out with AMZN was when I saw a product
| listing that where somewhere between fraud and word
| salad, complained, and was told that AMZN doesn't care
| what I think about a product listing unless I bought the
| product.
|
| Problem is if I try to buy something on AMZN I need to
| sift through large numbers of junk product listings, a
| problem I don't have with best buy, petsmart, adorama, or
| other reputable online retailers. Even the marketplaces
| like Ebay, Etsy and Temu seem less offensive to me.
| Result = I canceled my Prime subscription and now AMZN is
| the last place I will go to buy something and not the
| first.
| radicality wrote:
| I wrote another comment in the thread about it, but fyi
| as of now mid-2024 giving out incentives (free items /
| discounts / cashback etc) conditioned on a positive
| review, is considered fraud and can be reported as such
| on https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ .
|
| Next time I see such an offer in an item I order I will
| definitely report it. Maybe it will improve the online
| shopping landscape by an epsilon if we all do it.
| dotBen wrote:
| Fakespot is not infallible but a useful addition to any
| Amazon research process.
|
| They try to hide it from the front page (a bit of a dark
| pattern) but you don't need to download the plugin to use
| it, just visit https://www.fakespot.com/analyzer
| frereubu wrote:
| Yeah, I was really annoyed when it to me quite a while to
| find that URL after they changed the layout of the site.
| I only shop on Amazon when I absolutely have to, and have
| an extension just sitting there being regularly updated
| with who knows what code really didn't appeal.
| 0x2a wrote:
| Bookmarklet: javascript:void(open('https:
| //www.fakespot.com/analyze?url='+encodeURIComponent(locat
| ion.href)))
| radicality wrote:
| If you are ever a recipient of such an offer (free item,
| cashback, any benefit) and it is conditioned on writing a
| positive review (ie giving 1/5 won't get you the free
| gift), this is as of recently not allowed and considered
| fraud.
|
| Should report all such new cases you see to
| https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
|
| ftc press release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-
| events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Just go right to the tl;dr
| xattt wrote:
| Good advice for all product reviews and most articles too.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Anyone know of a browser extension that opens pages right to
| any detected tl;dr headings?
| reaperducer wrote:
| If you have Safari, and a machine that supports Apple
| Intelligence, that sort of thing is built in.
|
| Click on the leftmost icon in the URL bar, select Show
| Reader, then click on Summarize.
| aruggirello wrote:
| Mozilla's new Orbit AI assistant for Firefox is in beta,
| BTW:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42555440
| ppp999 wrote:
| Apparently not available for Firefox for Android
| fortran77 wrote:
| No, it was very interesting to learn about his process and
| the tools used to diagnose. (I had a similar problem with
| Acronis True Image killing KiKad performace on Windows!)
| cf100clunk wrote:
| As I replied elsewhere, the process is often a joy to read.
| In this case, perhaps a title like "Debugging QT5-related
| WiFi Dropouts in Windows" would have been better.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Hackernews isn't a problems & answers forum, the process is
| just as important as the conclusion.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Agreed, the process is often a joy to read, but IMHO this
| article was like one of those joyless vids or AI-generated
| articles in which one must bulk scroll or fast forward to
| finally get to the goods.
| Andoryuuta wrote:
| Haha, this made me chuckle :)
|
| I'll concede on the joylessness front. However, I assure
| you that all the posts on my personal blog are 100%
| artisanal human-made joyless posts! No AI needed.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Thanks, it was nothing personal. :)
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I was certain that I read about a very similar issue here in the
| past, and after some searching, found this exact article posted 2
| years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524702
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Algolia Search and Refined Hacker News appear to treat title
| strings as case sensitive, so didn't highlight the original
| version...
|
| i.e. Unusual vs unusual
| Raed667 wrote:
| Not sure what you mean about the search? I managed to find
| the post from 2022 with no issue: `rEsOlViNg aN UnuSuaL WiFi
| isSUe`
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Now try using this url string Algolia Search:
|
| https://ryuuta.net/blog/diagnosing-an-unsual-wifi-issue/
| Raed667 wrote:
| OK i see what is going on, the 2022 post was a different
| URL that now redirects
|
| https://blog.ando.fyi/posts/diagnosing-an-unsual-wifi-
| issue/
| Andoryuuta wrote:
| Yeah, I should probably update my Hugo theme to include the
| date (not that I ever write anything on there anyways TBH).
| Also, the I changed domains not too long ago, so that probably
| added some more confusion.
|
| I wrote this in 2020 apparently:
|
| https://github.com/Andoryuuta/website/blob/b95a693c745688995...
| creeble wrote:
| Interesting - Anyone know if this problem affects QT5 under
| Linux?
|
| I'll have to do some digging to find out, but curious if anyone
| else has seen this on Qt.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| It doesn't look like that polling code was used under Linux.
| The fix was to only poll on Windows XP, since apparently this
| wasn't even needed on newer Windows versions. The bug was also
| fixed in 2018, so you would only be affected if your
| distriubtion ships a severely outdated Qt5 version.
| creeble wrote:
| Thanks so very much!
| 404mm wrote:
| This is very similar to an issue I battled for months on MacBook
| Pro (one of the later Intel versions, like 2018-ish), although
| there problem was not in the HW itself but the current version of
| MacOS at that time (this is no longer an issue).
|
| I noticed that my WiFi had similar repeating lags .. about every
| 8-10s pings would go to a few hundred ms and then return to
| single/low double digits.
|
| Long story short, the problem was with several MacOS components
| (and maybe some 3rd party software) requesting Location services
| to determine Mac's position. To do that, among other things, Mac
| scans WiFi around you (probably for the names/SSID?) and to do
| that, the current WIFI connection is temporarily put on a back
| burner, resulting in a brief delay in traffic. The solution was
| to minimize location services.
| tonymet wrote:
| This plagued a lot of remote workers when the trend started due
| to ping latency causing terrible VC quality like delayed speech
| , dropped frames, out-of-order frames . Very frustrating.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >and to do that, the current WIFI connection is temporarily put
| on a back burner, resulting in a brief delay in traffic.
|
| I can't believe they ever thought that'd be a good idea.
| cenamus wrote:
| Probably have to sweep across the frequency bands, so it's
| physically the only way to do it. Still stupid to do it more
| than once every 15 minutes
| wbl wrote:
| Fast switching on a background schedule while packets
| continue to flow but at slightly reduced rate should be
| possible. Might be very export controlled though given
| obvious application.
| gtirloni wrote:
| You mean the RF circuitry has to continue working in the
| frequency of the current network and switch frequencies
| to scan for other networks in all bands simultabeously? I
| don't think consumer hardware is capable of that. It
| usually will send probes or listen passively for some
| time in a band before moving to the next one
| sequentially. It's an expensive operation.
| wbl wrote:
| I'm not an expert but I think depending on design this is
| sacrificing one MIMO channel when active and adding
| another PLL.
| sitkack wrote:
| It is more insidious to scan all the SSIDs within the RF
| sightline of a device than it is to install a GNSS
| receiver in the laptop. It means that not only do they
| get all the SSIDs but that they have also triangulated
| some of those SSIDs. You are also giving up the location
| privacy of everything you can see.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| That's not the only way if you are the one designing the
| hardware. Even if you can't make a radio that can listen on
| multiple bands, you can add a second radio.
| crest wrote:
| Oh there is an obviously correct way to do it: have two
| radios able to switch channels with without impacting
| traffic, but that costs more money as well as space and
| power. No lets just retrofit this crap into existing
| drivers and hope nobody expects their computer to work
| reliably.
| bandrami wrote:
| This is a great example of good ideas destroying themselves.
| "Software should occasionally be able to find out where the
| computer it is on physically is" is a cool idea, but once it's
| there every single piece of crapware out there does it
| constantly.
|
| See also desktop notifications for websites
| leptons wrote:
| There's a big difference there.
|
| You install an application you are giving it permission to do
| practically anything it wants to do with your system,
| including find the location as often as it wants to.
|
| Browsers have to ask you permission to show desktop
| notifications, or get your location, or anything else.
| gtirloni wrote:
| > You install an application you are giving it permission
| to do practically anything it wants to do with your system
|
| Not on macOS, AFAIK. You can add/remove permissions for
| that.
| eric-hu wrote:
| This is a more recent feature. I'm not sure if such
| granular permissions were in macOS back in 2020 when this
| blog post was written.
| bandrami wrote:
| Even when you have granular permissions, though, it just
| means the negative UX of having to click "no" every three
| minutes because some jackass at Adobe is convinced you
| really want to be told RIGHT NOW about every single
| product they make (or whatever).
| crest wrote:
| The authorisation prompt doesn't show up once you denied.
| Which makes sense to avoid user fatigue, but is annoying
| when users denied it the first time (aka "go away stupid
| modal dialog") and now complain about things working (or
| not) as designed. At some point operating systems and
| browsers will have to run a simulation to provide
| realistic fake responses from denied subsystems if
| application developers get even more brazen violating
| user interests and maybe even *locally* analyse API call
| patterns for abuse with the option of sending a trace to
| make a claim against the developer with the application
| distribution channel. Oh you added a bunch of criminal
| spyware libraries praying on your paying users? Guess
| that's a push notification to your whole install base
| offering them a refund and a ban on further sales until
| you've paid up. Except no existing player wields that
| much power and can be trusted to use it wisely. _sigh_
| jojohohanon wrote:
| I think they should (permission allowing) be able to ask for
| location, as often as they like.
|
| I pin the system disruption from this query squarely on the
| OS. It should make such determinations in the background and
| return whatever value it has, without starting up a new scan
| just for this query.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Reminded of https://mnpn.dev/blog/airplay-network-disaster,
| which was a very similar issue (now resolved).
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| In recent times, I found 2 troublesome issues: one was network-
| side and another was client-side.
|
| 1. Google/Nest WiFi mesh APs being "too close" to each other
| (30 ft / 10 m), causing a periodic backhaul mesh collapse.
| There was no user-visible indication of this, it was completely
| locked away and only noticed by support. I ditched Google's
| junk and moved to Ubiquiti.
|
| 2. On macOS, ObjectiveSee's LuLu has nondeterministic packet
| loss that causes SSH connection resets and a whole host of
| other weird problems. It's totally untrustworthy and shouldn't
| be used by anyone until it's proven reliable.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| Packet loss is supposed to be deterministic?
| dlenski wrote:
| > To do that, among other things, Mac scans WiFi around you
| (probably for the names/SSID?) and to do that, the current WIFI
| connection is temporarily put on a back burner, resulting in a
| brief delay in traffic.
|
| Scanning for nearby WiFi access points with excessive frequency
| might be a dumb idea for other reasons (e.g. power consumption)
| but it should *not* interrupt the functionality of the current
| network connection.
|
| If it does, that's a massive failure of the network card's
| firmware and/or OS drivers for it.
|
| My guess would be that the card is changing frequencies/bands
| to scan other channels, and is slow to switch back to the
| channel of the currently-associated AP, or doesn't properly
| buffer network packets while doing so.
|
| Under Linux, I don't think I've ever seen a case where WiFi
| scans appreciably affected a normal infrastructure-mode WiFi
| connection (whether from NetworkManager or triggered manually
| via `iw` etc).
|
| So much for Apple's vaunted hardware/software integration
| vel0city wrote:
| I've seen a lot of people experience lag spikes in Linux when
| software scans for SSIDs. It's a pretty common issue overall
| regardless of the OS, it's more of a device and driver
| quality question.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3xipom/how_to.
| ..
| dlenski wrote:
| > It's a pretty common issue overall regardless of the OS,
| it's more of a device and driver quality question.
|
| Right. I suppose I've been both lucky, as well as
| intentional in seeking out hardware with high-quality
| drivers when it was very important.
|
| I'm just surprised that *Macs* have this issue, given that
| one of the alleged selling points for Mac is that it runs
| on a very limited set of hardware which is supposed to
| enable careful OS/hardware integration and testing.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Scanning for nearby WiFi access points with excessive
| frequency might be a dumb idea for other reasons (e.g. power
| consumption) but it should _not_ interrupt the functionality
| of the current network connection.
|
| Scanning works by tuning the radio to listen for a beacon
| sent by the AP every ~100ms on every channel (there are 11
| 2.4 GHz and ~22 5 GHz channels in the US). Since you're not
| transmitting, it should be low-power, but you have to tune
| the radio to each channel, so you can't communicate with your
| AP.
| dlenski wrote:
| > Scanning works by tuning the radio to listen for a beacon
| sent by the AP every ~100ms on every channel (there are 11
| 2.4 GHz and ~22 5 GHz channels in the US).
|
| Yes, but good drivers can mitigate the latency hit by not
| scanning all the channels at once.
| https://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2016/05/16/networkmanager-
| and-w....
|
| > Since you're not transmitting, it should be low-power,
|
| Depending on the hardware/firmware quality, tuning to each
| channel can use a lot of energy. As for "not transmitting,"
| this is true for passive scanning (generally preferable)
| but not for active scanning.
|
| > but you have to tune the radio to each channel, so you
| can't communicate with your AP.
|
| Right, but _if the OS and drivers are written properly_ (on
| both the client device as well as the AP ) they'll buffer
| unsent packets... the high latency during the channel
| changes is unavoidable, but the dropped packets and broken
| TCP streams are NOT.
| vel0city wrote:
| From your quote:
|
| > With a good driver scanning takes only a few seconds
|
| A few seconds of not transmitting or receiving packets.
| This is in line with people having sudden several hundred
| millisecond ping spikes.
|
| A few seconds of no real traffic is absolutely noticeable
| impact for constant, latency sensitive traffic.
| dlenski wrote:
| > From your quote: > > With a good driver scanning takes
| only a few seconds
|
| You omitted the immediately following text: "*and the
| driver breaks the scan into chunks*, returning to the
| associated access point's channel periodically to handle
| pending traffic."
|
| A good driver will return to the AP's channel _during the
| scan_ so that there is never more than (say) 100 ms of
| latency even while the scan is ongoing.
| xp84 wrote:
| Worth the read just for the delightful Gift Note from your
| brother. LOL.
| fullstop wrote:
| I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one sending and receiving
| notes like this with my siblings.
| tonymet wrote:
| I encourage techies to dig into their wifi hardware & software
| end-to-end. Install smokeping on a raspberry pi (even a $10 zero
| works). Ping all of your home devices , your gateway, DNS & first
| hops of your IP.
|
| You will discover all sorts of disruptions affecting your network
| quality, including interference.
|
| For your primary devices like desktops & laptops, use mtr (my-
| traceroute) in a terminal window to watch your pings over time.
|
| Your connectivity issues , particularly with VC, terminal
| emulation & gaming, are due to ping latency , not bandwidth
| issues.
|
| You will find software issues like this one, the location
| services bug on MacOS, and others; as well as hardware issues due
| to transmission interference, noise, physical interference.
|
| Consistent & low pings are critical.
| toast0 wrote:
| This is such a pain to do though, because so much of it is
| seeing braindead behaviors and not being able to do anything
| about it.
|
| Putting as much as you can on wired ethernet helps a lot. Still
| have just as much bogus traffic, but on 1g (or even 100m),
| there's a lot more room for it.
|
| Everyonce in a while, I look at the broadcast traffic on my
| wifi and cry.
| tonymet wrote:
| wired is best, but for many it's not possible.
|
| MTR is a good start, and easy to run on a chron job. Graph
| the results with excel
| wolrah wrote:
| > wired is best, but for many it's not possible.
|
| For some it's not possible, but in my personal experience a
| lot of people who "can't" wire really just don't want to
| wire.
|
| Even if you can't do a full "professional grade" install
| there are almost always viable options unless you live in
| an apartment built like a prison.
|
| I have in the past:
|
| * Poked tiny easily-patched holes in the wall just large
| enough to pass a bare cable through to an adjacent room
|
| * Tuck cables under baseboard molding
|
| * Run cables through vents
|
| * Followed existing television/telco wiring
|
| * (last resort) Just stapled the cable to the wall/ceiling,
| optionally covering with stick-on covers.
|
| Most of those options can be hidden from view and all are
| trivially removable/repairable so there's no issue in a
| rental situation.
|
| Almost everyone can do most if not all of those things if
| they want to, they just usually don't want to because
| they've been trained to not like wires, that wireless is
| better.
|
| I have actually had a person complain about lag on their
| game console, which was in the shelves under their TV
| connected via WiFi to their cable modem which was in the
| same shelves, and they didn't want me to plug in a simple
| six foot cable between the two because they didn't want
| more wires. That's just pure stupid.
|
| If it doesn't move, it should be wired unless there is
| absolutely no practical way to wire it. Desktop computers,
| game consoles, TVs, etc. Even laptops, if you're working
| from home and sitting at a desk, have a cable there. Modern
| laptops with USB-C docking stations make it easier than
| it's ever been, the same cord that provides power also
| provides reliable high speed networking.
| tonymet wrote:
| fair enough. You're right it is possible. To me it's not
| worth the unsightly cabling and damaging penetration. I'm
| currently measuring about 1.5 ms / 0.5 ms SD pings on
| wifi. I could save 1.0ms on that by running cat5 around
| my house. But it would be unsightly , and add more
| penetration through my walls.
|
| It's all about tradeoffs. My efforts spent on running
| great wifi have paid off.
| wolrah wrote:
| Best case vs. worst case is important.
|
| Best case, yeah WiFi isn't substantially worse than
| wired, especially if all you care about is getting to the
| internet. Worst case, it's a fuckton worse. A wired
| network will never drop out for seconds at a time because
| something ran a scan (as noted in multiple places in this
| thread). A wired network doesn't give a shit about your
| microwave. A wired network doesn't have meaningful
| interference issues.
|
| The more active users you have on your network, the worse
| WiFi is going to be, where a wired network can take more
| users than you can fit in a residential environment.
| tonymet wrote:
| that's not "best case". that's a 30 day reading.
| luma wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, running cables through your
| vents in the US is an NEC violation (see 300.22). If
| you're renting it might be your only feasible option but
| probably not a great long term solution.
|
| Otherwise, I strongly agree with everything said above,
| wired networking is worth the investment.
| wolrah wrote:
| AFAIK low voltage wiring generally doesn't matter from a
| code perspective, but yea I would only see that as a
| temporary solution for renters and of course only use
| plenum-rated cable for it.
|
| I've only done that particular trick in an apartment that
| had through-wall vents above the bedroom doors so it was
| literally four inches the cable was inside the vent.
| creeble wrote:
| Good advice, but I'll add that there are many bad things
| smokeping won't detect.
|
| My favorites are APs/range extenders/meshes that don't do
| multicast properly (mDNS in particular, breaking lots of LAN-
| based apps), and also ones that seem to semi-randomly isolate
| devices (i.e., prevent devices connected to the AP from
| reaching devices that are not connected to it, except the
| gateway).
|
| There are a huge number of these devices (I'm looking at you,
| Netgear). Sometimes ICMP will work, but not TCP. It's
| nightmarish to debug, because it often seems to be some table-
| size issue in the AP, so devices will work for a while, and
| then some new device connects and the old ones break.
| tonymet wrote:
| you could use nmap or tcpping as the probe . smokeping
| supports any diagnostic
| settsu wrote:
| TFA never addresses what MediBang Paint Pro is using Qt for.
| Checking for updates, etc. (e.g., online account connection,
| sharing)?
| mrgaro wrote:
| As Qt is a GUI library (among other things) I would guess that
| Paint Pro is written entirely using Qt.
| settsu wrote:
| Ah okay, forgive my ignorance. The way the article is written
| I interpreted it to be a library.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I have a love/hate relationship with qt. It is powerful,
| generally well-maintained, and I've compiled the same app
| to windows, linux, Mac, and arm, and a specific use case
| needing JNI on android.
|
| It all just worked.
|
| Their licensing got really goofy for a while, and yocto
| (which unfortunately I became a "SME" of at work) made
| cloning and using anything after 5.15.2 very obnoxious.
| They needed to figure out how to pull a RedHat and get paid
| support, but this was right around the time electron (at
| least for a while) rendered native apps as second-class
| citizens.
|
| The bindings to other languages are neat, and the
| signal/slot idea is also neat. The whole moc part isn't
| great, but I understand why, and it has very rarely caused
| me any real issues.
| can16358p wrote:
| I have a completely unrelated issue: since switching to a new
| iPhone, only my iPhone occasionally can't access anything on Wi-
| Fi.
|
| All my other devices, including a MacBook and iPad connected to
| the same network work fine. My previous iPhone also worked just
| fine, it's just the new phone.
|
| I know how annoying these can become, and glad to hear that you
| could pinpoint it down.
| cyberax wrote:
| I had a similar issue!
|
| Around 2017 I moved into a new house and my MacBook Pro started
| getting latency spikes every few minutes. Not as bad, but still
| noticeable. This irked me quite a bit, because I spent several
| weeks wiring my house with the best POE-powered WiFi access
| points available at that time.
|
| So I spent some time debugging the issue, and it turned out that
| the culprit was in the location services! For some reason, the
| weather widget tried to check the location every few minutes, and
| that involved scanning for the WiFi access points. Which in turn
| meant that latency spike, I posted about it on StackOverflow (
| https://superuser.com/questions/1142798/experiencing-high-la...
| ).
| deathanatos wrote:
| But why does querying the registry cause the WiFi to drop?
|
| It smells like there is a AP search occurring, which I think
| usually causes the antenna to frequency hop for the duration
| search, which results in latency on the established connection
| since it can't transmit at the same time.
|
| But does enumerating registry keys do that? I didn't think the
| registry had dynamic behavior like that.
|
| Still ... a ridiculous bug.
| rincebrain wrote:
| If I understand correctly, it's triggering an actual wifi AP
| scan, and the AP enumeration in the registry is a side effect
| of finding the interface to go ask it to rescan.
|
| But I might be missing something.
| j-scott wrote:
| This is very similar to an issue I had while playing games on a
| wired Windows desktop. I haven't run into it in a long time now
| that I think about it. I wonder what might have changed.
| rincebrain wrote:
| My favorite stupid wifi thing I ever had, for some value of
| favorite, was a previous incarnation of my home router, which
| apparently had a known issue where certain Intel wifi cards
| connecting to the AP would cause it to start having firmware
| crashes randomly, which I discovered when I brought home a new
| laptop and my wireless on every device started being
| unreliable...
|
| Nothing to be done about it other than "don't do that" or
| "replace AP" since the firmware is a black box. It
| was...maddening.
| apfsx wrote:
| I had this exact same experience with a brand new Dell XPS 15 I
| purchased around 2018 I believe. It came with a killer branded
| Wi-Fi card and I noticed shortly after purchasing that it would
| literally bring down my entire home network at the time. I
| don't remember what router I was running or the rest of my home
| network set up at the time, but it was definitely a really
| bizarre thing to witness, I ended upreplacing the Wi-Fi card.
| foldor wrote:
| On a related topic. I have a really weird problem in my house
| where I'm about 20 feet from my TV trying to use my PS5 DualSense
| connected to a Google TV device connected behind the TV. It uses
| Bluetooth, which is also 2.4GHz, and the issue I'm having is that
| the dongle behind the TV is really impacting my controller
| connection and making playing games over PS Remote Play
| completely impossible. I even have the GTV device hard wired with
| an Ethernet adapter, as is my PS5. This can't really be a range
| limitation can it?
| EvanDotPro wrote:
| (Obligatory HN pedantry: arguably unrelated, but now I'll try
| to help anyway because this is quite common.)
|
| Bluetooth is pretty low power, but without the TV in the way,
| that range should be no problem at all. Problem is that a lot
| can block it physically and drown it out in RF noise.
|
| Most TV's probably have a thin, but solid aluminum plate in
| them for structure that could indeed block BLE and be causing
| the issue. Ironically, this is one RF case where metal studs
| would actually be helpful.
|
| For comparison, I fly a paramotor and use Sena Bluetooth mesh
| for comms, and just our heads at any distance are enough to
| block it if we're on the wrong side of each other.
| Motorcyclists on the other hand don't often have this issue
| since there's other vehicles and stuff to bounce their signals
| around.
|
| What might help if that's the issue is something reflective
| like foil mounted somewhere that can see both the controller
| and the GTV device. I'd also try to make the reflector
| slightly/roughly parabolic-ish (kinda shallow as to not make
| aiming difficult) pointed at the GTV device. You can hide the
| reflector behind and/or point it through anything RF
| transparent like wood or plastic.
|
| Another possibility is other 2.4ghz noise-- You could try
| turning down 2.4ghz transmit power on your AP as a possible
| quick fix. Of course if you haven't, make sure anything that
| can be on 5ghz, is.
|
| Edit: Note that a reflector will also reflect noise sources at
| the GTV device.
|
| I've also had issues with poorly shielded HDMI interfering with
| 2.4ghz in close proximity, so even just jostling things around
| behind the TV a little or using your best shielded HDMI cables
| there could help some.
|
| Debugging RF can be tricky and frustrating, but I hope one of
| these tips helps either you or maybe a passer-by one day. :)
|
| Happy new year!
| garganzol wrote:
| At last, I know what probably was causing my Realtek WiFi
| problems during that era (circa 2020). It is so strange that a
| Ring 3 application can wreck a havoc on the networking subsystem
| for the whole OS. Also it is weird that Qt, being a UI library,
| takes a role of advanced network guardian by monitoring the
| activity of network interfaces. What a mess.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > Later, (for unrelated reasons) I built an entirely new desktop
| computer, not using anything from the old one, except the new
| wifi adapter. This included a fresh install of Windows 10... A
| few weeks later, and the issue suddenly began happening on the
| new computer also
|
| This pretty clearly points to some weird software you've got
| installed. It's not hardware, and it's not a wonky Windows
| installation. What else could it be?
| Pxtl wrote:
| My reaction:
|
| "If scanning for wifi has that much negative impact on my
| connection, the OS should by default pop up a toast notification
| when it happens without a user request to do so."
|
| If MS can put slop like news and weather and ads for apps like
| Candy Crush into the Windows GUI, they can also give me _useful_
| info like that.
| tuzemec wrote:
| I have a similar issue with two M3 MBPro machines. There's a high
| volume of lost packets when I'm connected to my home 5GHz wifi.
| The 2.4 connection works just fine.
|
| All the other devices don't have any problems.
| alcoholic_byte wrote:
| I think some are missing the actual point here: Why does a
| software/hardware/driver concerned with drawing need to know what
| wifi-networks are available? That is tantamount to surveillance.
| An absolute no-go.
| disillusioned wrote:
| This isn't even particularly close, but I had a gremlin that I
| would notice at night time where I'd hear my CPU fan idly spin up
| and the computer slow down... come to find out I was basically
| getting port scanned and _blasted_ with RDP requests, and since
| RDP is a nightmare protocol with no rate limiting to speak of, it
| was obvious that some botnet had found the port I had changed RDP
| to and was hammering it to try to gain access to my computer.
| This manifested with svchost.exe maxing out CPU, and digging
| deeper revealed it was coming from a botnet in... well, who knows
| where.
|
| Obviously that was all the incentive I needed to finally heed my
| devops friend's warning and disable port forwarding and instead
| use Tailscale for remote access, but yeesh. Wild to watch happen
| first-hand.
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