Poisoned Apple

There is actually some valuable information here, buried at the end of paragraph six.

The internet stopped working yesterday. Or rather, my view into it. As the single most important basic utility in this house, and doing research for our business plan on a Friday afternoon, that’s a big problem.

We have lots of Apple gear in this house. Several MacBook Pro’s, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV all connected via wifi to a 2nd generation Time Capsule. But, yesterday, mid-day our internet connection was frequently jamming up, or very slow.

I rebooted the network (modem, router) several times, but that was only good for a few minutes. Next, I systematically started isolating and testing each element of the network, beginning with the cable modem, as it seems a natural reflex to want to blame Comcast. Right?

Ultimately, I swapped out the Time Capsule router for a 13 year old very insecure wireless-G router. Things work, albeit slow because we have at least 3 active users on MacBook Pro’s plus a total of 11 other Apple  devices doing who-knows-what software updates, secretly uploading our address books, tracking whether I’d been to the gym, and, being relentlessly spammed.

I was pretty sure I was going to need a new router, and started to think about the business case I would need to present to Mrs. CFO.  Then a friend semi-kiddingly mentioned discoveryd cache poisoning.

I would not recognize a poisoned cache if one crawled out of the bushes and bit me on the leg. And, I don’t know if that’s the root cause of the lost connection problem we were having. But, I found the following writeup, discoveryd Clusterfuck, at furbo.org, and applied the following recommendation:

To be safe, after turning off the cable modem, the TimeCapsule, and the Apple TV, I went around and turned off all 11 other Apple devices in the house, as well as the printer. Turned everything back on and, Voilà! We’ve been running smoothly for one day now.

Parting thought: I worry about Apple over the past several months, having invested in them, in the equity sense as well as the end-user sense. Normal people would not diagnose or find a solution for this. The thousands of messages on Apple forums about dodgy connectivity problems since upgrading to Yosemite are all over the map–recommending deleting of profiles, config files, reinstalling an earlier OS X, hacking bluetooth, keeping USB 3.0 devices away. Those are painful solutions, perhaps to a variety of different problems than mine. We’ve seen Message flakiness, iCloud incompatibilities, and other problems in recent months. Wanting to avoid this crap is the most essential reason Apple gear has been the Miller Family IT standard for many years. That’s over a dozen Mac’s, almost as many iPhones, iPads, etc. The only creatures in the house not using Apple kit are the goldfish (moisture issues) and the Cockatiel, because he can’t use a capacitive touch screen.

We’ve come to rely on the seamless integration and testing across the ever expanding universe of Apple devices. I just hope Apple can keep up with the complexity.