Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Maverick]

Bear of a morning here at Feanor Towers.
Multiple hardware failures, and me making an arse of things making it worse...

I was in Romania last week, and lost contact with my servers back home.
Call home, and yes, the Internet went down overnight and didn't come back.
Guided them through some basic diagnostics, and we have no blinkenlights on the Firebrick firewall appliance.
Looks like a failed PSU ( internal ).
It's done that before.
Ordered replacement PSU to arrive yesterday just as I get home.

Hmm, it's not the PSU.
There's perfectly good 5v going to the main board. Main board has further on-board regulators and the test points show a lack of 3.3v.
Call to AAISP, and they agree to send me a loaner whilst I send back the failed unit.

I still have your old FB105 if you want it back as a backup for the future 

[Feanor]

I have another FB105 which was indeed involved in the backup.

Only issue is that the 105 does not have a PPPoE client in it, the PPPoE endpoint needs to be done on the Modem.
However, the BTOpenreach Huawei FTTC modem has crippled firmware, and is locked down in Bridge mode, requiring the PPPoE endpoint to be on the router, which the FB2700 can do.

I hacked stock Huawei firmware onto the BTOpenreach modem, and gained access to the full config and was able to put it into Routing mode and set up the PPPoE client on the modem.
It then played fine with the old FB105.

[DaveReading]

The only problem with the RBLs are the legitimate senders that wind up on them, including yahoo (btinternet) and aol mail servers

Even BT's legacy (non-Yahoo) mail servers get blacklisted from time to time, which is a PITA if your outgoing email uses them.

I need to do something about my spam problem, it went from 5 spams a day to ~400 a day about 12 months ago (on an email address I've never attempted to hide that's almost 20 years old now). I really need to get my hosting provider to move it to IMAP and then use a script running on a machine at home to filter the spam to a separate folder (whitelisting, blacklisting, heuristics), also want to do some other filtering too.

For filtering incoming email, I've had some success using SpamBayes.  Although it would have you believe that you need to continually train it, I haven't found that in practice, it returns remarkably few false positives/negatives.

[Feanor]

In the on-going catalog of IT failures here at Feanor Towers, I now have another hardware failure.

My main PC has 2 big monitors.
The servers are headless, and I log into them over a Remote Desktop connection.

Sometimes, you need to have an actual physical console onto the servers, to access them before an RDP connection is up.
So one of my main monitors has 2 cables coming in the back:
One HDMI from my main PC, and the other VGA from the server KVM switch.
This lets me look at the actual VGA output from the servers.

Tonight, the monitor just died, and no longer displays anything from it's VGA port.
It's OK over HDMI.

So to finish fettling the servers, I had to drag another monitor over, and have it balanced precariously where the cables could reach.

How many more hardware failures am I due? FFS.

[Afasoas]

I think this is why I'm pondering dual pfSense firewalls. It's possible to do it with a single static public IP address ... once I have the hardware in place, it does mean switching both broadband lines to business packages, which means additional ££.

I'll also be making DNS and DHCP services highly available, so a failure with the main server (pfSense is virtualised on top) would just mean losing file shares.

Of course, still got just one switch. So I'll have to find another one and start LAGGing all the network connections.

[Ham]

Bear of a morning here at Feanor Towers.
Multiple hardware failures, and me making an arse of things making it worse...

I was in Romania last week, and lost contact with my servers back home.
Call home, and yes, the Internet went down overnight and didn't come back.
Guided them through some basic diagnostics, and we have no blinkenlights on the Firebrick firewall appliance.
Looks like a failed PSU ( internal ).
It's done that before.
Ordered replacement PSU to arrive yesterday just as I get home.

Hmm, it's not the PSU.
There's perfectly good 5v going to the main board. Main board has further on-board regulators and the test points show a lack of 3.3v.
Call to AAISP, and they agree to send me a loaner whilst I send back the failed unit.

In the meantime, I cobble together an alternative firewall out of chewing gum and Intel network cards to get the rest of the family off my case.

So today, replacement FB arrives, and I go to restore my saved config onto it.
But my last saved config was a bit old, and there had been changes since then.
So I'd manually edited the XML config file to current spec before restoring it.
All is well, and Internet Connectivity is restored.

Then the IP phone rang.
From extension 1002.
I don't have an extension 1002.
The call did not come in over the landline, it came in over IP.
But it hadn't come in to the Asterisk box over any of the IAX trunks I have from other family member's Asterisk boxes,
nor had it come in over the landline ( the landline phone did not ring ).  So how had the call come in to the Asterisk box?
I don't allow unsolicited SIP inbound through the firewall (Because people try to rape your Asterisk box for free phone calls onto the PSTN).

Dawning realisation...The firewall is not firewalling.
Pull the Internet connection straight away.
Check the config: I've messed it up manually editing, and got the default no-match to ALLOW not REJECT!!!
Fix this in short order.

But in the meantime, my 2 Win Server 2008R2 boxen have been compromised, and were hammering the Internet themselves.
I've just finished restoring them from backups.

And mid-way through fixing them, I lost the Remote Desktop Connection to both of them.
This time, it was a gigabit switch that decided to give up.
All port lights jammed on solid, no blinken like normal.
Replaced the switch and finally got the servers back up, and we're done.

I'm going to have a glass of grog with my lunch now!

This is a perfect validation of my adage: your IT problems will increase in proportion with your ability to deal with them.

[ian]

This thread makes me glad the only thing I do with my computers is turn them on and then off when I'm done with. Even the BT internets just work (jinxy! jinxy!).

Mind you, I just had to update MacOS because Apple and Adobe conspired to make InDesign crash my Macbook completely (some GPU issue says the internet). It's been a while since I had to hold down the power button in anger. I might have a said a bad word.

[Feanor]

I seem to have just repaired my old firewall appliance!

It has a single 5v supply onto the board, where some SMD regulators then provide 3.3v and other lower voltages.
The 3v3 was sitting at 0.5v, so the device didn't power up.

I thought I'd try back-feeding an external source of 3v3 onto the board, to see if it would start up.
I used a HBFO spare PC PSU, and used it for both the 5v and 3.3v.
I initially connected just the 5v. Nothing.
Then I touched the 3.3v wire on to the board. It sprang to life.
Then, un-touching the 3.3v it continued to run!

Re-connect the device's own 5v PSU, and it powers on and boots!

I think the HBFO 3.3v supply perhaps cleared the fault by burning away a 'whisker' somewhere.
I suspect the weedy on-board SMD 3.3v regulator simply wilted in the face of the load caused by an unleaded-solder whisker.
But the HBFO external 3.3v supply could horse enough amps down it to burn out the whisker, and restore normal operation.

[TimO]

Most recently, I've been using a Technicolor TG582n ADSL Modem/Router for my home Internet connection, and whilst OKish, it's never been entirely reliable or predictable in behaviour.

This weekend, I started getting odd issues with streaming video, that only seemed to resolve when I rebooted the TG582n. After rebooting it about a dozen times over a few hours, the degree of annoyance reached a peak.

Looking at the logs, it was suggestive of things actually being a line and/or line equipment issue, but the TG582n wasn't exactly helping things, when it randomly decided to stop responding to requests to the webserver or telnet daemon, to let me check what it thought was going on.  It was still on the network, since it's management IP would ping, and Internet access sort of worked, but I couldn't access it in a useful manner.

Looking up what Router my ISP recommended most recently, the Fritz!Box 3490 was on their list, and various reviews seemed to think it was good, even if it did look like something that Flash Gordon would have been proud of.

So, a quick hunt on eBay, purchase, 25km cycle across town, and two hours later I had a brand new unused Fritz!Box in my grubby little hand.

Since I set it up last night, I've had a (touches wood) perfect record of Internet access.  It was easy to set up, fairly easy to fiddle with the configuration and seems moderately secure and well featured.

Also, it allows me to have routed and NAT'ed connections operating simultaneously, with only very minimal fiddling, something which I could never get to work with the TG582n after several days of very very very annoying adjustments, reading up of technical documents, repeated reboots, and largely abject failure.

An unexpected benefit is that it supports 5GHz WiFi, as does my phone, but which as far as I can see none of my neighbours use, so the phone has completely unobstructed bandwidth to connect to the router.   I may have to invest in a 5GHz connection for the PC which currently hangs off an indifferent PowerLine connection.



it cost me twice what the Technicolor cost, and that was with the good price I found on eBay (£105), but after this degree of success, I could probably be convinced to have spent twice as much.

[Mr Larrington]

Christing puce, what a performance!

In the red corner, a brace of brand-new Crucial 525 GB SSD's and an not-new but previously unused Kingston USB 2/SATA disk enclosure I had lying around.

In the blue corner, a Windows 10 PC with a 128 GB SSD which keeps running low on space because, actually I don't know why, apart from Nvidia doing its level best to occupy all mass storage in the universe with three year old versions of its video drivers.  And a laptop which performs with all the alacrity of a drugged-up slof¹.

In the middle, Mr Larrington, trying to migrate Windows across the ring and swearing.  Because having tried AOMEI Partition Assistant, AOMEI Backerupper, EasesUS ToDo, Macrium Reflect and the version of Acronis True Image (spits) which Crucial carefully hid under the plastic tray in the box, different USB ports and both new SSDs in a wide variety of combinations and permutations, they all fail with error messages that either disappear off the screen before you can read them or are so cryptic even Alan Turing would struggle to decode them.  The Internets, obv, is being Not Helpful.  I do not believe it likely that both new SSDs were DOA.

Also Acronis (spits again) have an even more elastic concept of "time remaining" than Microsith.  And when it had apparently finished cloning the laptop's disk, I tried rebooting it and instead of the picture of a shiny shiny big-block Chevy V8 got some bunch of arse about Acronis being unable to find $DISK.  Won't boot off the Windows install stick either.

But anyway... I stuck the new disk in the Great Hall machine and Hey!  Presto!  "No operating system found".  Well fuck you, Acronis (spits).  Fuck you very much, AND the horse you rode in on.  Your software is shit at regular backups and now proves to be shit at disk cloning as well.

Fast forward to this morning.  Redid the Great Hall machine's disk with a thing yclept "Partition Wizard", as recommended by my chum Fards.  It worked, or at least did once I'd remembered how to access the BIOS and persuade it to boot off something other than thin air.  Laptop, with the benefit of a good night's sleep, booted Windows without complaint, copied its disk first time and came apart with very little difficulty and only two very very tiny screws dropped on the carpet.  And it booted straight away.  Backed up the data, twice, dragged out the Win 10 USB stick, took a deep breath and clicked "Nuke".

This time tomorrow I hope to have a pristine laptop containing nothing to cause any alarums and excursions in even the most mild-mannered Homeland Security gribley.

1: Which, for a Several of good reasons, is called "Slow Dempsey".

[Salvatore]

Some time ago my wireless keyboard stopped working.

I managed to invoke the soft screen keyboard, and while I managed to do most things I wanted too, it was a pain in the neck and not a long-term solution.

After a couple of weeks of hoping it would magically return to life, I started looking into specifications and prices of replacements, but before I paid any money, I thought I'd have nothing to lose by taking the keyboard apart just to see if there was anything obvious awry. With my set of tiny screwdrivers at the ready, I examined the back of the keyboard for recessed screws. Imagine my surprise when I spotted a microscopic on/off slider, which must have been accidentally pushed into the "off" position.

At least it was an easy fix.

[Mr Larrington]

I have been meaning to migrate my Babbage-Post from POP3 to IMAP for at least three years.  Today I finally doned it.  Yoicks, wot a palaver!

[Feanor]

Ah, yes.
I remember that PITA too.

I set up the new IMAP server, and configured all the client PCs ( they were PCs then ) with second accounts on the IMAP server.
I then shut down the SMTP service on the old mail server, allowing all mail to stack up on the secondary MX during the migration.

The migration was done client-side.
I went round the half-dozen family machines and copied the mail client POP inbox contents up to the IMAP inbox.

This works fine, with one gotcha:
If you bulk-select items in Windows, and then copy-paste, the copying happens in reverse order.
Last becomes first, and first becomes last.
Usually not an issue, but the IMAP server identified the messages in the order it saw them, ignoring the message timestamps.
So mobile clients which request the most-recent 25 or 50 got the oldest.
I had to delete everything, and re-do the migration with the client sort-order reversed.

Post-migration, I changed the MX record to point to the new server, and did a manual ETRN on the secondary which then dumped it's backlog and all was well.

[Mr Larrington]

The instructions were relatively simple doing it for the client end with Thunderbird, but the copying from the POP Yahoo account to the IMAP one kept dying on its arse for no readily apparent reason.  Eventually I found one message which it seemed to find totally indigestible, possibly on account if the 28 MB attachment.  I binned it.

Making it work on the other two PCs was just a matter of creating a profile and copying the whole lot over, but getting to that stage incurred much bad language.

[Feanor]

My advice is to clear all such shite from your mind, and get on a plane to the Southwest of the USA.
Works for me.

[Mr Larrington]

My advice is to clear all such shite from your mind, and get on a plane to the Southwest of the USA.
Works for me.

That's next week's to-do list.

[Kim]

I upgraded the home server from jessie to stretch.  Due diligence meant the mail system didn't break at all. 
 
So naturally PHP dependency hell shat all over several semi-important legacy applications (ie. squirrelmail and phpmyadmin), and now I'm trying to do SQL lookups in asterisk extension language, because that seems marginally less painful than PHP and more likely to get the phones working before bedtime.

I hate computers.

[Feanor]

I upgraded the home server from jessie to stretch.  Due diligence meant the mail system didn't break at all. 
 
So naturally PHP dependency hell shat all over several semi-important legacy applications (ie. squirrelmail and phpmyadmin), and now I'm trying to do SQL lookups in asterisk extension language, because that seems marginally less painful than PHP and more likely to get the phones working before bedtime.

I hate computers.

That's why I leave my Asterisk box alone.
When I needed another LAMP box for Roundcube Webmail, I *could* have hosted it on the Asterisk box, but Dependency Hell contra-indicated.

The Roundecube installation needs PHP version *this*, etc etc.
I was 99% certain that updating the Asterisk box PHP etc etc would cause the Asterisk installation to fall over, and I really didn't have the inclination to dive into that.

I regard the Asterisk box as an appliance, that is somewhat frozen in time.
It will be updated when I replace the entire box, and do a fresh installation which will also be frozen in time.

[Kim]

Virtualisation would be the sensible solution.  But that would involve effort.  Maybe next time a forklift upgrade is required.

[orienteer]

For some reason I couldn't display pdf files any longer. My PC defaults to MS Edge for pdfs, as my main browser Firefox goes berserk on pdfs, opening an infinite number of blank pages until I kill it. 

Rummaging round the interweb revealed that the secure site app Trusteer Rapport, which my bank recommends, is incompatible with the latest version of Edge, included in the two hours worth of MS updates to W10 last week, so I have to turn Rapport off to display pdfs.

[Mr Larrington]

I got that the other day after reinstalling 10 on my laptop but eventually persuaded it to accept Sumatra as the default PDF reader by hammering the point home in the "Default Programs" wossname in Control Panel.

[Mr Larrington]

After a false start involving Not Reading The Back Of The Thing, breathed new life into an iPod that hasn't been used for eleven months, jibbled playlists and the handy AdjustPlayCount script to make iTunes on the Babbage-Engine think it had played the 1400+ tracks I played on my holibobs last year, cleared everything off the iPod and loaded it with everything with a play count of 0.  Fewer than 6500 tracks out of more than 35000, which means I don't have to muck around downsampling them to some bit rate low enow that even my notoriously clothy ears might notice.

[Afasoas]

I hate computers.

This has become my catchphrase.
I've not done a jessie -> stretch upgrade yet, but I've not long built a mailserver on stretch and encountered some rather interesting php dependency issues. Also, the dspam package is not available in stretch so learning to configure spamassassin was a thing.


A completely broke my network today and found myself staring into the abyss and contemplating starting from scratch with pfSense configuration. Needless to say I pulled back from it before I was drawn in, restored a prior configuration and traversed a different and much together more sensible route, chastising myself for not realising it before launching into today's fettling session.

Suffice to say, the main switch now has redundant links into pfSense and those links are now carrying 6 vLANs*. Which is probably better than the old setup which had one link for the DMZ and the other link carrying everything else. One of those vLANs is the new lab network, which will hopefully come into being shortly without too much sweariness.


*LAN, Lab, DMZ, guest wifi, public wifi, media wifi

[Mr Larrington]

New ADSL filter seems to have cured Larrington Towers' annoying habit of dropping the broadband connection every time the landline makes (or, latterly, receives) a call.

[Kim]

While I was off touring the micro-USB port on the Arduino Leonardo that operates the doorbell sheared off, because it was held on my lead-free optimism.  I happened to have a spare of the exact connector, but a partially lifted pad and lack of a reflow toaster-oven thwarted my attempt at repair.

So I got the programmer out and bodged up a temporary fix with an Uno until a new Leonardo^[1] can be obtained.


_{[1] The only functional difference in this particular application is a different level of fussiness about long USB cables.}