I think it’s a fair comment. A lot of readers on HN are adept debuggers, and will start to analyze everything from the first paragraph. By burying the lede like that, it feels like wasted time, to have begun debugging before the (incredibly important) part about the unusual setup was revealed.
Seems almost implausible that the protagonist, with his technical knowhow, did not think of this earlier..
Anyway, it’s a matter of storytelling, and that matters!
I may have just picked this comment to express overall frustration so for that I apologize.
But I don't know - writing is something that comes in a flow. This wasn't some deliberate clickbaity thing by the author, they just wrote it in a way that that made sense to them.
It also seems that the author themselves did not consider the setup at first, which happens, as sometimes we have tunnel vision.
You may criticize his abilities I guess, although overall it just felt like an account of things as they happened to the author, not considering how someone might be trying to guess things once they publish it.
So yeah, I don't know, I just feel like there's too much negativity sometimes. But maybe I overreacted.
fwiw I don't think you overreacted. It's not like anyone's making hbn read this story. it's like complaining about the movie Titanic, that because we know the boat sinks, its not worth watching.
the alternate version of this post goes "I fixed my dad's Internet. The neighborhood's tree grew too tall and blocked the signal so I upgraded the 10 year old hardware. The end." How much less fun and interesting is that?
I'm not bragging, I'm just saying if you have one custom, specialized part in your setup that's particularly out of the ordinary and prone to failure, I'm surprised you wouldn't start there.
If you're e.g. running a piece of software with a crazy custom plugin that overhauls major functionality and then an update to the base software breaks everything, it shouldn't be TOO much of a mystery on where to start looking. When you add weird custom parts to a system, it tends to be a point of failure.
Perhaps the author just didn't remember that they had a custom setup like that, but it wasn't framed in the article like "suddenly I remembered...", it was just stated as a given. And the fact that it was giving them particularly high speed home internet access for the time, it'd be a kind hard thing to forget?
(Author here) I didn't forget, it just didn't seem like the most likely problem.
Like I said in a reply to a sibling to your comment, the gear was ~10yrs old at the time and had been working fine until then. It was perched in a very inconvenient spot because it had to "look around the corner" of the building, so checking the line of sight wasn't just a case of looking out the window.
I went in order of "most likely to be the problem, weighted by how easy they were to check." This is a debugging strategy that has served me well, and I don't regret using it that time either.
But rain is more obviously related^ to a point to point link than aging hardware or some kind of bad update?
(^though of course the improvement is surprising! I assumed there was antennae involved, whether point to point or LTE or whatever, just from the title. The story to me was from the outset why's it better not worse in rain.)
But it could be rain helping close a circuit on a rusty antenna connector port. Or rain improving the grounding of some neighboring circuit that otherwise drains through the metal scaffolding the antenna is attached to. Or rain attenuating a neighbor's own Wi-Fi that otherwise might have been aggressively transmitting on the same channel as our units.
The rain and the Wi-Fi devices were clearly related. How they were related, was not clear. Aging hardware rusts, breaks, gets yanked around or unseated or pulled out of the ground, or has water enter in places where it shouldn't be.
I was already running diagnostics on everything to figure out which devices might be faulty (local AP, local bridge unit, local antenna, remote antenna, remote bridge unit, remote switch, remote modem/router, upstream connection to ISP) so checking for "update gone wrong" was a 3 second job: I was already in the admin UI, so check logs, nope, no recent updates, done. I'd rather spend 3 seconds checking something that probably isn't the problem but I can know for sure in 3 seconds than risk climbing precariously up a scaffold 30ft in the air only to realize it was just something I could have solved at a keyboard instead.
Risk/reward. Low risk, low reward is okay too if it's super fast and already on the way.
Yes, it’s not a competition, but if you have a line of sight network connection and the network only works when it’s raining, the obvious thing to check is that line of sight.
I didn't think to check the line of sight because I was primed by the fact the bridge had been running fine for 10 years. With networking gear that old, it seemed more likely that a device/cable/power brick had just gone bad with age.
Also, the antenna is on some metal scaffolding propped out 6ft past the edge of our balcony, because it needs to "look around the corner" of the building. It's 30ft in the air, and checking the line of sight involved climbing up there. It certainly wasn't the easiest nor the likeliest thing to check, so I didn't check it first.
Multiple people in the comments just here on HN have mentioned having weird situations caused by routers that had gone bad. I imagine most of their routers weren't 10 years old when they started acting up. How old is your router?
