4 ms·

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

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        that's not "best case". that's a 30 day reading.
        wolrah 2y ago
        Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but if you're claiming you are seeing 1-2ms pings consistently over a 30 day period on a WiFi network you're either doing something wrong with your measurement or you have a very unusual network with no other devices active, no meaningful interference, and extremely high signal strength. It's not technically impossible, but it's so unlikely as to be the sort of thing the marketers who like to use terms like "AC3200" would be embarrassed to claim.
        tonymet 2y ago
        https://imgur.com/a/VdBgwkE https://imgur.com/a/VdBgwkE
creeble 2y ago
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 2y ago
  you could use nmap or tcpping as the probe . smokeping supports any diagnostic

toast0 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        that's not "best case". that's a 30 day reading.
        wolrah 2y ago
        Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but if you're claiming you are seeing 1-2ms pings consistently over a 30 day period on a WiFi network you're either doing something wrong with your measurement or you have a very unusual network with no other devices active, no meaningful interference, and extremely high signal strength. It's not technically impossible, but it's so unlikely as to be the sort of thing the marketers who like to use terms like "AC3200" would be embarrassed to claim.
        tonymet 2y ago
        https://imgur.com/a/VdBgwkE https://imgur.com/a/VdBgwkE

creeble 2y ago

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 2y ago
you could use nmap or tcpping as the probe . smokeping supports any diagnostic