DISCLAIMER:
To my knowledge, the spaces wifi connection does NOT store data regarding which device is using what data (if it does I do not have access to it, nor have I accessed it), and the ONLY info I have here is roughly how much data is used on any given day, along with rough usage times. NOTHING ELSE.
ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING ELSE POSTED BELOW IS AN UNINFORMED ASSUMPTION, SIMPLY MY BEST GUESS. I AM NOT REFERING TO ANY INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS, NOR DO I EVEN HAVE ANY IDEA WHO THEY COULD BE. MAYBE MY OWN PHONE GOT STUCK DOWNLOADING AN UPDATE OVER AND OVER, WHO KNOWS?
I DONāT.
The following details what I suspect is a fault in the MHV infrastructure, not any fault, malicious, intentional or otherwise, of any member of MHV, nor is it intended to imply so.
Hi all, I was going through the list of chores today and ended up looking at our mobile data, as I was going to top it up.
Iāve heard a number of people say that they feel like they put, say $50 on, and then itās gone near instantly.
I checked the usage history, and can confirm that this is happening.
Now, $50 of credit with our current provider will buy us 10GB of data.
Well, the most recent Tuesday we had data, over 6GB was used in less than an hour and a half.
Historically, this appears to be a common occurrence on Tuesday nights (6GB being the most Iāve seen, but 1-3GB being rather common).
In addition to that, one Tuesday at ~7:30, 693.67MB was downloaded, another Tuesday at the same time, 693.86MB, less than 200KB of difference.
You can probably guess whatās causing the second downloads, something in the space is updating itself every Tuesday morning at 7:30.
Now something something āPatch Tuesdayās a memeā or whatever, but I suspect we have something in our space pulling updates. That still doesnāt explain the 6GB download in an hour and a half.
That said, Iām guessing itās much the same. Devices updating.
For that, Iām guessing someone, or multiple people, are coming in with the Tuesday night group, turning on their laptops, and their laptops are pulling a windows update.
No fault here, weāve all done it, but we do need to work out a way to stop it.
I, personally, have disabled all update mechanisms on all my devices years back (Probs shouldnāt be telling you all this, plz no rootkit Iāll buy you beer instead ( ā¢ĢąŖ¦ā¢Ģ©Ģ„Ģ )), because trying to convince my laptops which devices were mobile hotspots and which were safe to update on was like a dangerous game of knifey-fingers but with Steve Ballmer holding a gun to my phoneās head and asking āDo you feel lucky punk?ā, and even though my macbook seems to nicely acknowledge that my Xiaomi is a portable hotspot, and it is not to be used for updating, I canāt say the same for any windows devices.
So we can probably do the nice thing, flag our access points as mobile data, cross our fingers, and hope windows doesnāt decide it needs to download a full installer of itself just to do some patches, OR, OR, we can point the relevant microsoft URLās to a null address and hope the laptops canāt work out how to get through.
Another option is to put a update server in the space, one which caches windows updates, but that would rely on a fully updated device entering the space, sharing its update to the server, then the server distributing it. If not, and the server downloads the updates itself, then weāre at square one.
Iād say implementing all these measures is preferable. black hole-ing any MS update addresses, configuring our APās to request devices donāt perform updates on them, and a local MS Update server just for good measure (I mean, I donāt think thereās anyone here whoās using the space as a means to update their devices, but if they are, itās costing us $30 per update. Letās share it around a bit at least)