Networking

I recently found myself needing to reset an iPhone 6 to its factory defaults. There is some useful stuff to have if you’re trying to do this:

• the passcode for the phone
• the AppleID with which the phone is associated
• an iTunes installation
• an Internet connection capable of downloading the iPhone software image in 15 minutes

It turns out the first two are optional given the last two, or at least a reasonable facsimile. If you don’t have the last one, you have to fake it. Here’s how I spent my first day of funemployment compensating for some Apple engineer failing to consider that it might be nice to download a file before you need to use it.

WiFi is fairly ubiquitous in 2015. In most of the nonprofessional contexts in which we use it, it’s provided by a small box that’s plugged into mains power and an Ethernet cable, usually with an antenna or two sticking out of it. I’ve heard these boxes called all kinds of things - hotspots, middleboxes, edge routers, home routers, NAT devices, gateways, and probably a few more I’ve forgotten; there are surely more I haven’t heard. “Router” is the word I hear and use most often myself, despite the unfortunate overlap with a more specific meaning (a device with multiple network links, capable of sending traffic between them). There are an awful lot of things these boxes do which aren’t implied by “router”!