I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

This reminds me of a conference, attendees were having sporadic problems with accessing the Internet and eventually I was able to capture a trace of the problem: when the main lease network filled up, it started allocating IPs from another block, but with the same gateway. I got a lease for something like 10.1.1.69&#x2F;24 with a gateway address of 192.168.1.1.<p>I went to the support person and she offered to reset the WiFi, but I explained that she needed to escalate it because it was a configuration problem, resetting it was only a temporary solution.<p>(edit: PyCon 2006 IIRC, DFW)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;erratarob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1739132876732674539?s=46&amp;t=FFxXRm_qmWG4nJwsccRUbA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;erratarob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1739132876732674539?s=46...</a>

This is adjacent to the classic free WiFi hack on airplanes, which is to boot another client off of their DHCP lease by spoofing their MAC.<p>It’s unfortunate that, below HTTPS and a light smattering of WiFi encryption, there’s essentially no authenticity controls on LAN management protocols.

How does one learn about this stuff? I learned about basic networking in college (the TCP layers) etc but people doing such stuff sounds like Greek to me.<p>If I want to learn more about what the author is doing, is there a resource like a udemy course or YouTube channel you guys can recommend?

I love that “internet reset” button

&gt; Obviously, one solution to the problem is that DHCP leases on planes should be drastically shorter, like at 1 hour intervals. Secondly, the number of leases should be drastically increased.<p>Why isn&#x27;t the solution as simple as, &quot;Reset the Internet at every flight turnover&quot;? Once the plane lands and (almost) everyone deplanes, hit the button as another step in crew handover.

15+ years ago, I had the same problem at a Starbucks. I asked the cashiers to reboot the modem, but they didn&#x27;t understand why. Then I showed my new Microsoft certification card which has MCSE and few others and told them that &quot;trust me, I know what I&#x27;m doing&quot;.<p>They called their manager, who was also suprised but decided to go along with it and restarted the modem, solving the problem. I remember all the employees were looking at me for the rest of my visit (which was few hours because at that time I was working from Starbucks).<p>Glad I wasn&#x27;t the only one :)

Deep in the granite mountain where the internet Kill Switch is located, there is also the US national Internet Reset switch.<p>What exactly, in this fictional universe, is the restoration flow if it is pressed?

Back when my company was a tiny startup the old nyc building door had an intercom buzzer and physical keys. To make it easier to get in I wired a raspberry pi w&#x2F;relay into the intercom and built a web UI. The pi setup wasn’t solidly reliable for weeks at a time, but fortunately it was plugged into an outlet with a light switch so everyone knew to turn it off and back on again. But since it was by the door, no matter the labeling from time to time we’d come in to find it turned permanently off.

DHCP is broken all of the time in these inflight WiFi systems. After they reset, you need to wait forever for the portal to turn up after which point there&#x27;s a storm of clients trying to create or re-establish an Internet session which usually saturates the super small link unless it&#x27;s satellite-based (and sometimes even then)

I upvoted this in the futile hope that the right person sees it.

It’s fun how a sorta absurd term like “reset the internet” now has an obvious meaning, usually resetting whatever access point type device is nearest the person resetting it.

&gt; Apparently in the front near the entrance&#x2F;exit, there&#x27;s a button simply labeled &quot;INTERNET RESET&quot; that she presses whenever a customer complains.<p>I worry that this is actually part of a RESTful interface. In that case it probably garbage collected erratarob et al, replacing them with a fresh version of our universe&#x27;s page that had working internet for that plane.<p>Until someone proves me wrong we probably shouldn&#x27;t press that button again...

Reminds me of when our router failed at work. Every machine got booted off the network, except mine. Digging in, my machine somehow got assigned an IP that looked like our public facing IP, not a local address.<p>We replaced the router, but the problem turned out to actually be that a construction worker had accidentally cut our fiber line.<p>Absolutely no clue how my laptop got to the internet. It must have failed over to some other WiFi network or something

Why don&#x27;t laptops randomize their MACs?

&gt; Obviously, one solution to the problem is that DHCP leases on planes should be drastically shorter, like at 1 hour intervals. Secondly, the number of leases should be drastically increased.<p>Or just hit the &#x27;internet reset&#x27; before each boarding, why are they over complicating this?

All the WiFi vendor had to do was use a properly-sized subnet like 10.N.0.0&#x2F;16, but no, they couldn&#x27;t provide something better than a shitty retail home router with an aviation-grade reset button panacea.

For what it’s worth, dual stack with IPv6 + DNS64&#x2F;NAT64 would be a great solution here, as well. SLAAC and a &#x2F;64 would make it pretty unlikely for this kind of failure mode to occur.

I used to work at one of the larger IFE providers and we always being asked to make the system as dumb as possible because flight crews hating supporting them. Not surprising to see this exists.

There&#x27;s another one in the cockpit, marked &quot;Avionics Reset&quot;.

Interesting. The &quot;minimum F&#x2F;A&#x27;s required: 5&quot; sticker suggests it&#x27;s a pretty big plane that holds around 250 passengers. So it probably happens less often on smaller planes.

The author has more courage than me, opening “hacking tools” (Wireguard and Terminal) on an airplane.<p>(Yes, I know they’re not actually hacking tools, but try explaining that to a random flight attendant.)

Sounds appropriate... - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kBLkX2VaQs4?t=92" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kBLkX2VaQs4?t=92</a>

Always good to see something from Rob.<p>Question would be how high in the management chain did that have to go before a &quot;internet reset&quot; button was added to a plane.

I had a Internet connectivity problem on a JetBlue flight recently that I couldn&#x27;t figure out. I could see the captive portal, with a URL like &quot;planSelectionPage&quot;. I would check the agreement and hit &quot;Let&#x27;s go&quot;, and some JavaScript would trigger and look like a new page was loading, but would just stay on the same page. It happened on both Firefox and Chrome. My phone connected without a problem.<p>I wasn&#x27;t sure how to debug it.

Hacking WiFi on a plane is a sure fire way to get yourself added to the no-fly list.