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nottorptoday at 7:33 PM6 repliesview on HN

In the same direction, I once wanted to test an embedded device on crap wifi.

So I just ordered the cheapest AP I could find.

Except the damn device worked perfectly. Slow but rock solid.

One of our testers at $CURRENT_JOB also has trouble simulating a crap network, because our network is good.


Replies

makr17today at 9:51 PM

Coming up on 20 years ago I was building a system that was going to be deployed at various locations throughout a very large country. All locations had internet access; but the throughput, latency, and quality (e.g. packet drops) were all over the map.

For testing we ended up building a small linux box to proxy for the test environment in the office. We could throttle the throughput to any arbitrary level, introduce latency, and introduce packet drops. It's amazing how poorly a frontend will work when you throttle the network to 128kbps, and introduce a small percentage of dropped packets. But once you get the system to work (for some definition of "work") under those conditions you feel pretty good about deploying it.

a_t48today at 9:13 PM

I'm building a product that helps out Docker usage in poorly networked environments (ie, robotics deployments). I've just been moving the Jetson around the house.

gnopgniptoday at 8:27 PM

You can simulate bad wifi with the throttling option on the network tab of your browser's developer tools

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callistocodestoday at 9:23 PM

Putting a StarLink dish so it has a tree branch in the way is a good way to get packet loss.

Groxxtoday at 7:48 PM

Some proxies, iptables extensions, and OS-provided tools exist - there's almost certainly a combo that would work for them. What platform?

Unless it's for a custom physical device, then uh. idk. Probably something, proxying through another computer that is hosting a separate wifi network? But likely a lot harder.

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