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2026-07-07

Week 287: Network trouble

A mysterious problem afflicted our home internet connection. The symptoms were strange: 50%+ packet loss to the outside internet, and anything that relied on a connection was very unreliable, except my desktop computer, which was also unreliable, but was able to communicate perfectly with the outside world when connected to a VPN.

I ran a test on the VDSL line, which identified a real fault: “impairment in copper joint”. I contacted my ISP; they weren’t seeing any packets loss on the connection, but they would contact OpenReach to fix the hardware.

This implied that there was a problem inside the house. I unplugged all the wired devices, and the wireless devices instantly enjoyed perfect internet access. I plugged wires back in until I found the culprit: my desktop.

I thought that it might be the network hardware or its driver (it’s a Realtek, so it seemed a likely culprit), but connecting via a USB ethernet adapter resulted in the same problem: within a few minutes of being plugged in, every other device in the house experienced degraded service.

Someone more knowledgeable said that it sounded like a bridge loop. One thing that creates a lot of bridges is Docker. I stopped that, and the problem went away. I don’t know exactly what Docker was doing, because I deleted all the containers and networks that I no longer needed, which was all of them, because they were all for work, and …

With the end of the quarter, my contract came to an end. They’ve been lovely people to work with, but I’m very glad to have a summer holiday and enjoy a bit of time off.

Every time I finish a contract, I wonder if it will be my last software job. I might think AI is a waste of everyone’s time and the planet’s resources, but if a bunch of know-nothing managers are convinced it’s the future, there are fewer jobs to go around, and the ones remaining require an obeisance to the machine god that I will not make. It might all go pop, but the market can remain irrational for a famously long time. At least I made some decent pension contributions and ISA savings while I could, so I might just about find myself thrown free of the wreckage – unless, of course, the bursting of the bubble wrecks all that as well.

The engineer from OpenReach turned up a couple of days after I contacted the ISP. He fixed a dodgy termination at the cabinet and the reported impairment disappeared. I don’t think it’s made any discernible change to the service, however. The noticeable problems were already fixed by terminating Docker.

I spent the rest of the week doing domestic chores and working on my EMF talk.

The United States of America is 250 years old, which doesn’t seem like a thing worth celebrating. I hope for all our sakes they don’t make it to 300 without serious constitutional and attitudinal adjustment.

It’s been hot, but bearably so, and not nearly as hot as the week before.

Just a few links for this week:

• ‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses’ cruel fantasies “Bosses are haunted by the knowledge that even though they fancy that they’re driving the car, if they don’t show up, everything continues to work. Whereas if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. And so perhaps they’re in the back seat with a toy steering wheel. AI is the promise of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain of the car.”
• The Cruel Rebranding of the Vagrancy Act “Scrapping an old piece of paper means absolutely nothing when it’s immediately replaced by fast-tracked dispersal orders, civil Respect Orders, and the ongoing, daily theft of tents and sleeping bags by council enforcement teams.”
• What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums They’re still out there, serving niches, and some of them are thriving and pleasant communities.
• .gitignore Isn’t the Only Way To Ignore Files in Git Indeed not; I use .git/info/exclude regularly but still have to remind myself of the path every time.
• How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. These systems don’t think, they don’t reason, they don’t have intelligence or agency, and perhaps we shouldn’t let ourselves be lured into talking about them as if they do.