Lab Manager, the network and the firewall9 October 2026
All 14 devices came back as themselves after the firewall's upgrade
One firewall divides the house into four groups, and the lab knows which devices are
present from the WiFi access point itself.
A wireless guest reaches the internet and the television corner and nothing else, and
the lab sits behind its own router, held closed by 26 checks every hour.
An arrival is logged 6 seconds after a phone joins and a departure 2 to 3 minutes
after it leaves. A phone is known by the name it announces, because its hardware address
changes.
That evening the internet link dropped 99 times in an hour, so the lab now reads it every
five minutes and puts the remedy on its firewall page, because no alert reaches a phone
while the internet is down.