Silly Season on the Internet

Stupid Post about WiFi interference does the rounds

Last Wednesday I when down the beach to figure out why PierToPier.net had gone down. Mostly it was the problem with node 1's Router. However that shouldn't have taken down the whole network, it should have been able to route the the Granville, accept they'd hung Tinsel on the antenna!

Original Message to the PierToPier tech list

World War 2 Radar Jamming as effective today as it was on D-Day.

"Window" was the codename for strips of foil dropped by Lancasters on D-Day to fool German Radar into believing there was an attack on Calais. Radar bounces off the foil sending the radar waves in random directions.

Nowadays we don't call it window, we call it “Tinsel”. Lots of small reflective strips. Tinsel is an effective blocker of microwaves as Window ever was. Yesterdays network outage was caused primarily by the addition of some, very tasteful, Christmas decorations to the antenna of node 4!

Node 1’s ADSL line is still out, the routers up and reports the ADSL is up but still no joy. I Have blocknoded node 1 off from node 2 as since it can ping the ADSL router it thinks it’s a gateway, and keeps advertising its self as such. Node’s 2,3,4,5 are all up and routing through the Granville.

The Story was picked up by Dave who put it on his blog. The by the register who posted it as part of the folow up to Xmass lights take out ADSL. Roll on Christmass when things get sane.