Name your wireless horror stories

[spidey07]

There was a very large installation that somebody put in with 100 or so access points. They had spent months trying to figure out why signal to noise ratios were so low. The whole thing never ran more than 5.5 Mbs data rate.

Well the guys who designed it were very smart to use diversity antennas to assist with all the metal in the area. This is why you see two antennas on an access point, it's to help with reflections and distortion.

But they mounted the diversity antennas some 8 feet apart!!!!!! yeah, that's gonna cause just a few problems there guys.

 

[cmetz]

I have so many stories of the form (site you really don't want to find out about having problems) + unsecured access point.

You might think that there's been enough mainstream press on the subject that people would get it.

 

[p0lar]

Point-to-point hop at 5.8GHz in an otherwise RF-clean area...
Neighbor's bizarre screen door would cause signal degradation when left open.

Believe me, I tried about a thousand other options before noticing the pattern -- probably wasted a solid week on that.

When they say RF is a black art, they REALLY mean it.

 

[cross6]

Or the place where I work expecting a 25 node mesh to be stable using hacked wrt-54g's. They laugh whenever I mention cisco

 

[xSauronx]

repost of mine from another thread:

Originally posted by: xSauronx

oh god i saw the most ghetto bridge setup ive come across yet yesterday near kansas city

the wisp i work for bought this company last week, sends me out to re-connect a former customer in the service area.

"the old equipment is in the attic, switch them out to canopy and bring the old stuff home"

the AP is on a water tower just shy of a mile away, theres a couple of trees between the client and the ap unless youre just in the right spot on the roof. guess what the old equipment, *in the attic* was that they had aimed at this water tower?

done? give up?

it was a linksys wireless bridge, secured to a beam in this attic with zip-ties and staples. it had what ill guess is about a 4 or 5 dbi omni antenna on it. just up the same beam was stapled some wire mesh, 2 inches behind, but in line with the omni, and shaped into an arc to act as a reflector :disgust:

after talking to the admin in our home service area, his understanding is that most of the customers in this new area have a similar setup :/

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: cross6
Or the place where I work expecting a 25 node mesh to be stable using hacked wrt-54g's. They laugh whenever I mention cisco

and there were days i thought *my* company was run by crackpots.

 

[nweaver]

at my work, we used to use crappy old 1100 AP's (B only) and 64 bit wep that had a key that you could almost find in Spaceballs....a freaking tech company, who does WIRELESS testing for CISCO....

yeah, not that way now....

 

[Cooky]

One day our Desktop group came over, and said the new batch of laptops don't work on our wireless network.
Spent entire afternoon troubleshooting it.
Turns out they mounted the mini PCI wireless card wrong - they reversed the connectors.
Somehow it worked w/ the wireless in Starbuck downstairs so they claimed it was our wireless that was faulty...yeah right.

 

[spidey07]

It is NEVER a network problem.

I don't care what anybody says. It's NOT a network problem. It never is.

Oh - horror story.

Large wireless install with a pretty big area not functioning too well, 50-80% packet loss, terrible and variable Signal to Noise Ratio. Turns out it was a 2.4 Ghz video transmitter raping all channels at 100% utilization. If I ever need to take down any wireless network I now know how to do it. It is IMPOSSIBLE to stop this kind of attack.