Hi everyone! I'm a Year 12 student in Australia working on my HSC Design and Technology major project. I'm designing a small, quiet home server built from reused computer parts that anyone could use to run things like game servers, file backups or AI tools from home.

I'd really appreciate your input, even if you've never heard of a home server. Beginners are exactly who I'm designing for.

- 10 questions, about 2 minutes
- Anonymous, no email needed
- Results only used for my school project

Survey: https://forms.gle/6w8WRU6bz8vzcuaz9

Thanks so much, and happy to answer any questions in the comments!

Is it because of NAT and firewall so for example (routers ip):2435(port)? And it remembers that a connection has been requested and does it go to the same port? (In this case 2435)

facing packet loss during random periods of time.

i want to pin point the cause, how do i do it?
thank you

Hi there! Does Protected managment frames encrypt the frames or it adds like Message Integrity code to the frames?

Thanks!

I've been building **PulseDrop**: receive AirDrop from an iPhone on a Windows 11 PC, no Mac involved.

**Stack:** TP-Link Archer T3U (RTL8812BU) on WinUSB → OpenIPC **devourer** (userspace Realtek driver) → seemoo-lab **OWL** (AWDL) with omdrop-owl's patches → TAP adapter → a Python AirDrop receiver. Discovery, approval and transfers all work. A 4K video arrives intact (SHA-256 matches).

**The problem is speed.** Same 80 MB video:

**What helped (measured, same file each time):**
- **Link loop drain.** The main loop pulled one RX frame per pass whenever a TX was due, so the RX queue backed up and TCP read the latency as loss. Fixed: 0.65 → ~1.7 MB/s on a 53 MB file.
- **Block Ack.** The iPhone *does* send ADDBA to a non-Apple peer; my frame filter was dropping it. Accepting it plus the chip's hardware BlockAck responder made the phone aggregate (A-MPDU), but it got *slower*, about 0.4 MB/s. The cause: retransmitted subframes arrived after later ones and went to TCP out of order. After I added a 64-slot reorder buffer (BAR/DELBA handling, 100 ms hole timeout), aggregation is ~1.65× faster than without it.

**What didn't help:** channel matching to the phone's slots, 24 Mbit/s PC TX, a higher HW retry limit, opening the unicast gate in the phone's free slots, advertising SGI20, and advertising two spatial streams (the phone switched to MCS11–15 but stalled).

**Where I'm stuck: 80 MHz.** Apple peers advertise a VHT Capabilities element (AWDL TLV 0x11) and channel 149 as operating class 128. I copied that and tuned the T3U to 80 MHz. Along the way I found and patched two devourer Jaguar2 bugs:
1. The 80 MHz primary sub-channel code was written as a position index, which put the primary on 157 instead of 149.
2. REG_DATA_SC and the MAC RFMOD bits were never set, so hardware ACK/BlockAck went out on the wrong slice.

After the patch the phone does send some 80 MHz frames. But at 80 MHz the T3U misses **7–10%** of the phone's frames, against **0.2%** at 20 MHz. The phone retries, drops to VHT MCS3–6, and the transfer ends up *slower* than at 20 MHz. DIG sits at its IGI floor (0x1c), and pinning a higher IGI made it worse. CRC failures don't show up (the chip seems to filter them in hardware).

**Questions:**
1. Anyone with RTL8812BU/8822B experience at **80 MHz in monitor mode with the hardware responder**: is the RX loss expected (T3U internal antennas?), or is there AGC/RF setup a userspace driver usually misses?
2. Which **external-antenna** USB adapter would you pick for this (devourer supports Jaguar1/2/3 and RTL8852)?
3. AWDL folks: does anything besides VHT caps and the channel sequence decide whether an iPhone uses 80 MHz / 2SS toward a peer?
4. Any way to keep the phone on our channel more of the time? It's noticeably faster with the phone off its home Wi-Fi.

Code (GPL/MIT, Windows): https://github.com/gsl0001/windows-airdrop (speed work in PR #1). Happy to share logs. The bridge prints per-5 s RX stats: rates, A-MPDU, retries, sequence gaps.

Big thanks to seemoo-lab (OWL/OpenDrop), omdrop-owl and OpenIPC devourer. None of this exists without them.

Hey everyone,
I’m fairly new to networking and trying to understand PuTTY. I’ve seen technicians use it to connect to switches through a console cable, but I’m not sure how the whole process works.
What exactly happens when we connect a laptop to a switch using PuTTY? How do we access the switch, what information can we see, and what commands are commonly used?
I’m especially interested in learning how this works with Aruba switches.
I’d appreciate any explanations or resources for someone just getting started. Thanks!

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For a college assignment, I've been asked to create a project that solves a real problem in NetOps. I fully understand what NetOps is, but part of the requirement is to find a Network Engineer and schedule a Zoom meeting with him or at least to text him and ask some questions about their experience.

As a student, I don't have access to anyone with

hands-on experience in the field.

Could anyone here help me out?

I had new wifi installed today with vodafone. My NAT type on xbox says unavailable but apparently my console is connected to the internet. I’ve turned on UPNP and turned the firewall off. I’ve restarted my console and router multiple times, cleared the cache and un checked the tagging. I literally have no clue what else to do.

I want to know the which companies networking devices used in india

Like a router, switch, firewall, Anivirus or any another devices.

Specially for Mumbai and Pune Division

So yesterday, my mobile data completely ran out, and I had this crazy, desperate thought: What if I could somehow just connect to my friend's home Wi-Fi from my house?

Obviously, standard Wi-Fi range is just a few meters. But theoretically, is there a way to build a workaround or a "tunnel" to share actual internet bandwidth over a long distance? Almost like a remote personal hotspot.

I know VPNs can connect two local networks, and things like SSH tunneling exist, but how would you seamlessly route all your phone/laptop traffic through a friend's router miles away without massive latency?

• What would the tech stack look like if we had to build a software solution for this?
• Would it require specific hardware (like Point-to-Point antennas) if they live a few kilometers away?

Has anyone ever tried building a jugaad like this? I’m genuinely curious about the networking theory and practical application behind it. Drop your ideas!