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I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this. People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of ran

I (used to) work in academic IT and I hate articles like this. People would assume there is a serious problem, turn off a bunch of services, run a bunch of random-ass shell scripts, and then forget that they'd done all that and at some random point in the future discover that some feature wasn't working, and blame me.

lxgr 4y ago
Couldn't have said it better. That script will be hanging around on people's laptops for years, if not decades (for people that migrate their macOS installations to new machines) at the end of the long tail.
jcynix 4y ago
I mostly agree. But the article isn't the main problem, the sloppy script is. When I install such hot fixes, I have them check if the cause still exists (e.g. still running under Monterey?) and, additionally, add a timeout based on a date.
- more_corn 4y ago
  If you simply disable the nic apple helpfully reenables it 15 min later. There’s blame to be assigned here. Pretty sure it belongs to apple.
bin_bash 4y ago
don't forget all the cargo-cult of people stumbling on this article with unrelated wifi issues!
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Including all the tech-savvy computer people with decades of experience, who figure the modern hardware and software has so many complex interactions that it's often better to try any plausibly looking solutions first, and only then figure out why it worked (or revert it if it didn't).
more_corn 4y ago
I just spent the last week diagnosing catastrophic Wi-Fi issues at a client location. 90% of macs wouldn’t connect to Wi-Fi, when they would association would take 45 seconds. Sometimes you couldn’t route or ping the gateway. When you could you’d get disassociated within a minute. Turning off the airdrop/anirplay interface fixes it instantly. sudo ifconfig awdl0 down It took us 5 days to figure it out. We had no less than a dozen professionals on it. Each with at least a decade of experience. We combed the Wi-Fi and network config repeatedly to figure out what we did wrong. (It wasn’t till we had the hint that it was client side that we sniffed the nic to see the packet of death) So I’m going to respectfully disagree. Articles like this are important. If I’d seen this last Monday it’d have saved me a week of hell and saved my client a week of vastly diminished productivity. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars spent diagnosing it and the millions of dollars of lost revenue from the deals they couldn’t close because calls kept dropping in the office (because enough people were on hotspots to saturate cell service in the area)
- acdha 4y ago
  Information is important, but this post didn't have enough technical information about how to tell if this is your problem. How many people would say they haven't experienced “slow internet connection” or “drops in Zoom calls”? “entirely losing a WiFi connection” is less common but does that mean “it happened once and then it came back” or something like the hell you're describing. That's important for the reasons the person you're responding to mentioned. I too have seen many problems caused by this kind of thing where someone had something they didn't like, made a ton of low-level config changes based on random blog posts, and then forgot about that when it broke something else.
- moltar 4y ago
  Was it happening to M1/M2s like the article states? Because I’m experiencing very similar issues with a 2019 model.
  - anilv 4y ago
    I work at Meter. It does happen to older models as well with an updated MacOS but not as acutely as with M1/M2 Macs.
crazygringo 4y ago
I swear I really wish there were a way to output an entire OS's "diff" from default settings. Every preference pane, every terminal setting, every changed system file. So that you could both discover, in cases like this, what's changed -- but also simply so you could export your settings in a space-efficient way and (selectively) re-import on a new OS install.
- gerst20051 4y ago
  I compare previous to current settings using a pattern like this. # backup defaults to a file in the home directory with the current timestamp alias backup.defaults='defaults read > ~/.backups/defaults_$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).txt' # compare the most recent defaults backup file to the current defaults config alias diff.defaults='diff -u <(cat ~/.backups/$(ls -1 ~/.backups | grep defaults | tail -1)) <(defaults read) | delta'
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  This has gotta be some sort of HN meme at this point but... NixOS gives you this (with the tradeoff of course of a really steep learning curve and very opinionated packaging structure)!
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    The asymptote for NixOS approaches -infinity. Once it actually is usable, sure, I'll take a look.
  - est31 4y ago
    Tbh in the hypothetical scenario where all of a company's configuration were handled via nix, you'd be staring at tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of company-custom .nix files where one single line might cause the bug you are encountering.
    - remexre 4y ago
      Right, but at least anyone could look into it in the company repo, instead of needing to poke at the actual machine (or an image of it)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gavin_gee 4y ago
back in the day i used to support microsoft's ISA product (layer 7 firewall) customers would just not know what configuration they had made. so we had a bit of VBScript that would dump the entire config into a text file. amazing how many customers had left themselves open in bad ways in production systems and also how their perspectives of what was configured did or did not match reality.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That product was the worst. I remember they had a client that people wanted to install for some reason. In one case, the client would bypass some configuration that was supposedly critical and I got stuck in the middle of some crazy argument between security, network ops and support.
jimmaswell 4y ago
I messed with my Switch's netwotk settings based on a random Tweet some years ago for Smash, maybe something about packet size. So did a lot of other people. I wonder if I aught to clear that. Doesn't seem to hurt though.
anilv 4y ago
This is a good point, we’ll make sure to update the post to note that the advice is no longer needed once Apple fixes things on their end. The script will get killed with a simple restart, so the odds of this hanging around are low. For companies that decide to implement this or a similar solution using MDM, `sudo pkill -f /tmp/disable_awdl.sh && sudo ifconfig awdl0 up` will also disable the effects of the script.
duxup 4y ago
From the first to the last day I worked in computer networking I encountered otherwise capable people who thought that if they randomly rebooted things… the problem was with the last thing they rebooted before “it worked again”. It was an endless discussion about how restarting things can have second order effects, including impacting the equipment that really was the cause.
nigamanth 4y ago
No-one should run these shell scripts unless they're 100% sure that they know what they're doing. The problem lies in the fact that anyone can run shell scripts which can break the OS or make the OS work. Unfortunately, there's a very thin line between making it work and making it break.
howinteresting 4y ago
Well then Apple shouldn't have shipped this bug then. Why blame individuals rather than the $2.3 trillion dollar corporation which can't get its act together. People in the know are aware that this is just the tip of the iceberg with macOS bugs. Wifi bugs that everyone has to work around, APIs that promise Unicode NFC but aren't actually NFC, quadratic performance bugs caused by various always-on Apple services that trigger under mysterious circumstances, regressions every other minor version, the list goes on. Linux, which has orders of magnitude less money behind it, is somehow so much more robust. But Apple won at capitalism, and the dream of most startup founders is to also win at capitalism, so this forum is filled with sycophants.
selykg 4y ago
The problem is this is a real legit problem that I experience daily. I was having this issue where video and audio calls on my MacBook were degrading super badly. I’d reset the modem, I reset the router, reset everything. Reconfigured everything I could. Nothing helped. I ran a packet loss test online. Link below. It was showing huge delays in packets. I came across an article somewhere. Forget where now. Disabling the awdl0 interface fixed the issue entirely for me. Packet loss tests worked perfect every time. Turn the interface back on? Problem reappeared immediately. That said, I manually turn it on and off as needed and don’t set things up to disable all the time. But it’s a real issue that was causing me a great deal of problem at work. So it’s not just some bug to me. It’s a serious one and you seem to be saying it’s not and people turning it off and forgetting is a big deal. I suppose it could be but don’t reject that it does fix a real issue.

lxgr 4y ago

Couldn't have said it better. That script will be hanging around on people's laptops for years, if not decades (for people that migrate their macOS installations to new machines) at the end of the long tail.

jcynix 4y ago

I mostly agree. But the article isn't the main problem, the sloppy script is. When I install such hot fixes, I have them check if the cause still exists (e.g. still running under Monterey?) and, additionally, add a timeout based on a date.

more_corn 4y ago
If you simply disable the nic apple helpfully reenables it 15 min later. There’s blame to be assigned here. Pretty sure it belongs to apple.

bin_bash 4y ago

don't forget all the cargo-cult of people stumbling on this article with unrelated wifi issues!

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Including all the tech-savvy computer people with decades of experience, who figure the modern hardware and software has so many complex interactions that it's often better to try any plausibly looking solutions first, and only then figure out why it worked (or revert it if it didn't).

more_corn 4y ago

I just spent the last week diagnosing catastrophic Wi-Fi issues at a client location. 90% of macs wouldn’t connect to Wi-Fi, when they would association would take 45 seconds. Sometimes you couldn’t route or ping the gateway. When you could you’d get disassociated within a minute. Turning off the airdrop/anirplay interface fixes it instantly. sudo ifconfig awdl0 down It took us 5 days to figure it out. We had no less than a dozen professionals on it. Each with at least a decade of experience. We combed the Wi-Fi and network config repeatedly to figure out what we did wrong. (It wasn’t till we had the hint that it was client side that we sniffed the nic to see the packet of death) So I’m going to respectfully disagree. Articles like this are important. If I’d seen this last Monday it’d have saved me a week of hell and saved my client a week of vastly diminished productivity. Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars spent diagnosing it and the millions of dollars of lost revenue from the deals they couldn’t close because calls kept dropping in the office (because enough people were on hotspots to saturate cell service in the area)

acdha 4y ago
Information is important, but this post didn't have enough technical information about how to tell if this is your problem. How many people would say they haven't experienced “slow internet connection” or “drops in Zoom calls”? “entirely losing a WiFi connection” is less common but does that mean “it happened once and then it came back” or something like the hell you're describing. That's important for the reasons the person you're responding to mentioned. I too have seen many problems caused by this kind of thing where someone had something they didn't like, made a ton of low-level config changes based on random blog posts, and then forgot about that when it broke something else.
moltar 4y ago
Was it happening to M1/M2s like the article states? Because I’m experiencing very similar issues with a 2019 model.
- anilv 4y ago
  I work at Meter. It does happen to older models as well with an updated MacOS but not as acutely as with M1/M2 Macs.

crazygringo 4y ago

I swear I really wish there were a way to output an entire OS's "diff" from default settings. Every preference pane, every terminal setting, every changed system file. So that you could both discover, in cases like this, what's changed -- but also simply so you could export your settings in a space-efficient way and (selectively) re-import on a new OS install.

gerst20051 4y ago
I compare previous to current settings using a pattern like this. # backup defaults to a file in the home directory with the current timestamp alias backup.defaults='defaults read > ~/.backups/defaults_$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).txt' # compare the most recent defaults backup file to the current defaults config alias diff.defaults='diff -u <(cat ~/.backups/$(ls -1 ~/.backups | grep defaults | tail -1)) <(defaults read) | delta'
dwohnitmok 4y ago
This has gotta be some sort of HN meme at this point but... NixOS gives you this (with the tradeoff of course of a really steep learning curve and very opinionated packaging structure)!
- noasaservice 4y ago
  The asymptote for NixOS approaches -infinity. Once it actually is usable, sure, I'll take a look.
- est31 4y ago
  Tbh in the hypothetical scenario where all of a company's configuration were handled via nix, you'd be staring at tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of company-custom .nix files where one single line might cause the bug you are encountering.
  - remexre 4y ago
    Right, but at least anyone could look into it in the company repo, instead of needing to poke at the actual machine (or an image of it)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gavin_gee 4y ago

back in the day i used to support microsoft's ISA product (layer 7 firewall) customers would just not know what configuration they had made. so we had a bit of VBScript that would dump the entire config into a text file. amazing how many customers had left themselves open in bad ways in production systems and also how their perspectives of what was configured did or did not match reality.

Spooky23 4y ago
That product was the worst. I remember they had a client that people wanted to install for some reason. In one case, the client would bypass some configuration that was supposedly critical and I got stuck in the middle of some crazy argument between security, network ops and support.

jimmaswell 4y ago

I messed with my Switch's netwotk settings based on a random Tweet some years ago for Smash, maybe something about packet size. So did a lot of other people. I wonder if I aught to clear that. Doesn't seem to hurt though.

anilv 4y ago

This is a good point, we’ll make sure to update the post to note that the advice is no longer needed once Apple fixes things on their end. The script will get killed with a simple restart, so the odds of this hanging around are low. For companies that decide to implement this or a similar solution using MDM, `sudo pkill -f /tmp/disable_awdl.sh && sudo ifconfig awdl0 up` will also disable the effects of the script.

duxup 4y ago

From the first to the last day I worked in computer networking I encountered otherwise capable people who thought that if they randomly rebooted things… the problem was with the last thing they rebooted before “it worked again”. It was an endless discussion about how restarting things can have second order effects, including impacting the equipment that really was the cause.

nigamanth 4y ago

No-one should run these shell scripts unless they're 100% sure that they know what they're doing. The problem lies in the fact that anyone can run shell scripts which can break the OS or make the OS work. Unfortunately, there's a very thin line between making it work and making it break.

howinteresting 4y ago

Well then Apple shouldn't have shipped this bug then. Why blame individuals rather than the $2.3 trillion dollar corporation which can't get its act together. People in the know are aware that this is just the tip of the iceberg with macOS bugs. Wifi bugs that everyone has to work around, APIs that promise Unicode NFC but aren't actually NFC, quadratic performance bugs caused by various always-on Apple services that trigger under mysterious circumstances, regressions every other minor version, the list goes on. Linux, which has orders of magnitude less money behind it, is somehow so much more robust. But Apple won at capitalism, and the dream of most startup founders is to also win at capitalism, so this forum is filled with sycophants.

selykg 4y ago

The problem is this is a real legit problem that I experience daily. I was having this issue where video and audio calls on my MacBook were degrading super badly. I’d reset the modem, I reset the router, reset everything. Reconfigured everything I could. Nothing helped. I ran a packet loss test online. Link below. It was showing huge delays in packets. I came across an article somewhere. Forget where now. Disabling the awdl0 interface fixed the issue entirely for me. Packet loss tests worked perfect every time. Turn the interface back on? Problem reappeared immediately. That said, I manually turn it on and off as needed and don’t set things up to disable all the time. But it’s a real issue that was causing me a great deal of problem at work. So it’s not just some bug to me. It’s a serious one and you seem to be saying it’s not and people turning it off and forgetting is a big deal. I suppose it could be but don’t reject that it does fix a real issue.