When I read the headline, I thought the article was about fans (and the attached lights) that mysteriously turn themselves on without the owner doing anything.
This happened to us, and the people we bought the house from had actually bought (but not installed) a new controller. Turned out the problem wasn't the controller at all. Rather, all the houses on the street had been built at the same time by the same company, and most (maybe all) had ceiling fans that came with a remote. Inside the remote and inside the fan was a DIP-switch consisting of four switches, each switch labeled with a 0 and a 1 depending on which way you pushed it. And all probably came from the factory with a 0000 setting.
You guessed it: while ordinarily the controller had a limited range, sometimes (windows open? controller pointed in a certain direction? I don't know) one neighbor's controller would activate someone else's fan. The solution was of course simple: set the DIP switch in our fan and controller to some other setting, like 0101. Since I did that, the poltergeist has been unable to operate our ceiling fans.
Famous past HN discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371
>The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining (predr.ag)
1147 points by bonyt on April 1, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 325 comments
The story does seem suspicious to me. He said he encountered 98% packet loss when pinging websites, but that means he has sent at least 50 pings. Default ping only does 5. Even if you increase the count, after 20 lost packages wouldn't you have decided the connection isn't up?
Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi. I find it hard to believe that a networking engineer and his son that's also an engineer use the incorrect term?
I’m just going to say your comment re: ping makes 0 sense to me. I sometimes leave ping running in the background for hours to find patterns in connectivity issues.
Re: your other comment. When my dad has problems with the internet, he will say the wifi is not working. And this isn’t incorrect, even if the source of the issue is not happening between the router and his device. Sure, the underlying issue may be something else. But by that logic putting anything but the final root cause in the title would be misleading or “real network engineers wouldn’t do that”, but I would argue that would just be bad storytelling..
mcswell · · focus · HN ↗
This happened to us, and the people we bought the house from had actually bought (but not installed) a new controller. Turned out the problem wasn't the controller at all. Rather, all the houses on the street had been built at the same time by the same company, and most (maybe all) had ceiling fans that came with a remote. Inside the remote and inside the fan was a DIP-switch consisting of four switches, each switch labeled with a 0 and a 1 depending on which way you pushed it. And all probably came from the factory with a 0000 setting.
You guessed it: while ordinarily the controller had a limited range, sometimes (windows open? controller pointed in a certain direction? I don't know) one neighbor's controller would activate someone else's fan. The solution was of course simple: set the DIP switch in our fan and controller to some other setting, like 0101. Since I did that, the poltergeist has been unable to operate our ceiling fans.
a_bonobo · · focus · HN ↗
>The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining (predr.ag) 1147 points by bonyt on April 1, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 325 comments
xnorswap · · focus · HN ↗
throwaway198846 · · focus · HN ↗
legacynl · · focus · HN ↗
Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi. I find it hard to believe that a networking engineer and his son that's also an engineer use the incorrect term?
x3ro · · focus · HN ↗
Re: your other comment. When my dad has problems with the internet, he will say the wifi is not working. And this isn’t incorrect, even if the source of the issue is not happening between the router and his device. Sure, the underlying issue may be something else. But by that logic putting anything but the final root cause in the title would be misleading or “real network engineers wouldn’t do that”, but I would argue that would just be bad storytelling..