Tales From The Shop - Wifijack
This is one of the more legendary examples of Naval Ingenuity that I had the honor of being a part of. It’s important to know that at NAVSTAGL there was a single solitary way to connect to the internet. The base had an wifi provider that you had to pay to access called GoWifi, This was a dogshit system. We’re talking $30 a month for up to 10 mbps. For comparison, the value plan from AT&T starts at 300mbps for 60$ a month. That’s not my exaggerating, that’s what they advertise on their website. By the way, the 10mbps wasn’t a guarantee, that was the absolute best it would do. So this system, which would go down often, was not exactly conducive to either communication with home, or any kind of leisure. It’s not supposed to be. It’s one of those systems that the Navy gets to throw in to pretend they give a shit about your standards of living.
I, did however start CVW-20 in the barracks. So how did we do it? Well, we built our own network. On about 3 occasions, we ran DCS multiplayer on a system that involved port forwarding a mobile hotspot. By the way, none of our rigs could handle this. We were playing off of some MSI laptops with GTX 1650s, and I was running a Lenovo Yoga Laptop with integrated graphics. It was a special kind of jank, but it did work.
One man however went way further than we had the balls to. One man would not accept the lackluster of what the Navy deemed us worthy of. To protect his identity I shall refer to him by his real name: Bennett. Ah Bennett you genius. So every barracks that supported GoWifi, had it’s own router. That was the access point. Well Bennett is basically a power user in most things he does and for 90% of the crap he does, he needs a solid wifi connection. Bennett basically found the router for the barracks, ordered a long as balls ethernet cable, and then connected direct to the router. Which…… He was not explicitly forbidden from doing. I mean obviously he wasn’t supposed to, but he wasn’t breaking any rules. Anyways, it became a not ultra uncommon sight to see a long ethernet cable stretching from the machinery room to Bennett’s room from time to time.
And none of us were gonna rat him out. I just wish I thought of it first.
