The computing stuff rant thread

[Mr Larrington]

It downloaded the thing yonks ago and keeps trying to apply it.  Seems turning off the Windows Update service, nuking the Software Distribution folder and turning the service back on will keep it at bay for a bit, but it always slithers back in when you’re not looking.  I think I might start making a habit of deferring Windows updates on that box and only switching them back on temporarily every week or two until the next big one rolls around - did something similar on the laptop a while back and it installed big update n+1 happily even when big update n had failed a Several of times.

[ian]

My computer faultlessly installs updates while I sleep, says a smug person.

[Mr Larrington]

Well, if you’re the sort of undemanding user who's happy with what FruitCo deigns to let you have in your box

[ian]

Very happy, thanks!

[Kim]

I have a similar penguin-based arrangement.  It emails me to let me know what it's been up to, and whether it's one of the minority of updates that won't take effect until the next reboot.

Maybe one day Microsoft will work out how to do this stuff properly, and save us all half an hour.

[ian]

Macs just pop up a notification saying there's an update and giving you the option to install it there and then or let it install while you sleep. Never had a problem with update or had to do anything manually.

I have fond memories of trying to shut down Windows because I had to dash to a meeting or catch a train and seeing the dreaded installing update 1 of 35,657, do not shut down your machine...

I guess MS keep this kind of thing around for nostalgia.

[Kim]

I have fond memories of trying to shut down Windows because I had to dash to a meeting or catch a train and seeing the dreaded installing update 1 of 35,657, do not shut down your machine...

The problem I've found is that the less Windows I use in day-to-day life, the more regular these incidents become.  A Windows machine that spends most of its time shut down always needs to install eleventy updates each time you use it.

[Polar Bear]

I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates.  They can be scheduled as oppose to simply happening and they can be delayed even when scheduled. 

It's no big deal.

[ian]

Actually, my centrally mismanaged mothership Macbook does the 'your computer is restarting in 5 minutes' thing when the Appleverse hits it with something important, rather than wait until I sleep. There's no option to delay it.

That's a tad annoying when it's a complete OS upgrade, you're on a dodgy internet connection (normally for the nocturnal updates, a Mac downloads it ready to go), and in two minutes you're due to present to 750 people.

[TheLurker]

I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates.  They can be scheduled ....

Which is all well and good if *you* control the schedule.  My primary work machine is Win10, locked tighter than a gnat's chuff  by our (3rd party IT bods, natch), and it is common to get peremptory messages of the form, "Restart your machine now!  We* have installed new vital** software and we've already triggered the countdown to automatic restart."



* ...control the horizontal, we control the vertical...
** Contains 99% lie. It's usually just some shitty office product which I use once in every 10th blue moon.  Now and again it will be OS patches.

[Kim]

I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates.  They can be scheduled as oppose to simply happening and they can be delayed even when scheduled. 

It's no big deal.

They're reboot-happy and frequently add a massive delay to the startup/shutdown process, rather than happening in the background like they do on other OSes.  Murphy's law dictates that this will happen at the least convenient moment, typically when either time or electricity are in short supply.

It's not so much that it's a big deal, as that it's unnecessary.

[Mr Larrington]

I really don't understand all the fuss about Windows updates.  They can be scheduled as oppose to simply happening and they can be delayed even when scheduled. 

It's no big deal.

It's no big deal IF THEY WORK.  I've had the same update failing to install practically daily for the past Several of weeks.  Then it takes an extra 10-15 minutes to roll back before you can use the machine again.  And that's on a box full of SSDs and sporting an 8-core i7 running at 4 GHz and 32 GB of RAM.  If my laptop was doing it the heat death of the universe would intervene.

And I've never forgiven Microsith for waking my laptop out of hibernation to install a GBFO update over two yoghurt pots and a piece of string somewhere in the arse end of western Ontario, in the days before you could defer updates while you were travelling.

[Mr Larrington]

FAR*, a line consisting solely of the character “}” is not actually blank, is it?  So when you’re told to remove all the blank lines from those seven hundred files wot I am trying to tidy up you really didn’t orter remove the “}” ones as well.  You electrotwat.

* a Windows Find And Replace thing, m'lud,

[Mr Larrington]

No, Windows batch file, if I tell you to go to "F:\foo\bar" and then delete *.sii from all sub-directories then kindly do so.  Do not stay in F:\foo and do the delete, because there are files in other sub-directories of F:\foo that I would rather like to keep.  More than 30,000 of then, actually.  You ["dimwit" - The Invigilator].

The second time I ran it, it worked as intended

[Morat]

I have fond memories of trying to shut down Windows because I had to dash to a meeting or catch a train and seeing the dreaded installing update 1 of 35,657, do not shut down your machine...

The problem I've found is that the less Windows I use in day-to-day life, the more regular these incidents become.  A Windows machine that spends most of its time shut down always needs to install eleventy updates each time you use it.

and the network admin's fave - a machine that is used all day but the user hits "remind me later" before shutting down at 1701. At 0908 the user rolls in late, misses the "catchup call (are you here yet)" from their line manager and replies complaining that he/she was in on time but their computer is slow and they need a new one. This is then translated into "IT is shit, why are all our computers out of date" by the time it reaches the grown-ups.
Steps have been taken :/

[Mr Larrington]

As an experiment I tried <ALT-F4> from the desktop, selected “Shut Down” and Lo!  It shut down straight away without any of that tedious “do the first 30% of the update that doesn’t work” business.  w00t

[ian]

O my band-o-broad hath forsaken me. Wherefore art thou BT? I doth lack optimism.

ETA. An engineer has been dispatched. On horseback. From the darkest parts of Faraway. He may arrive within 48 hours. Or not. Now that's the sort of leap-to-it service I pay a premium price for.

[ian]

I must, in part, chew upon a few of my words. There was a dingle of the bell at 8.15 this morning. Then another. I mostly ignore the bell as damp weather leads to false-positive doorbell incidents. Also, I was sleeping. After the third dingle-ding, I rolled over to wake up my wife, who it seems was in the shower and thus unlikely to attend to the urgency at the front door. Dragging myself downstairs, pausing to find pyjamas, by the eighth dingle-ding, there was indeed a man in hi-viz and an Openreach van on the drive. Ugh, glurgh urgh gah, said I. Plug this into the socket, said he. It's been a while since I've plugged anything into a socket that early in the morning. It takes a couple of industrial-sized mugs of coffee to straighten out my thoughts these days.

Anyway, it seems some nefarious operative had 'disconnected us at the cab' so service is restored. He then disappeared up the street to do 'the others.'

[Kim]

Anyway, it seems some nefarious operative had 'disconnected us at the cab'

You know when you've been Kellyed.  Lift'n'shifts are their speciality.  There's a reason AAISP broadband-only lines play a recorded message telling the engineers not to steal the pair...

[tiermat]

This is more a rant about me trying to operate computer equipment, than about the kit itself.

The night before last we had a power cut (eeek!).  Apart from having to go around and reset clocks on microwaves etc, the Mac mini that I use for backups didn't come back.  Nor did the Drobo.

The Drobo I sort of fixed by connecting it to my MBP and running diags (still running now, it thinks one of the disks has failed)

To get the mini working again I pulled everything out of it then only plugged in network, video and power

No dice

Spent all day trying different things, all to no avail, it was still dead (the "power connected" led lights up, so the PSU should be good)

I look again this morning, checking all the connectors again and find the power switch above the power connector.  I, obviously, previously had pushed the connector in then hit the power button with my chunky fingers.  This time, maybe due to the location etc I hadn't, thus thinking it wasn't working.

I feel like a right idiot!

The good thing to come out of this is that I finally upgraded my fileshare box to Fedora 33 and fixed the Samba issues with that, then shared out an external drive to act as a Time Machine.

[Kim]

pfSense!  I appreciate that my slightly off-book configuration caused issues with your upgrade process.  But pls to be failing more harmoniously than pretending to work while not applying any firewall rules, leaving everything wide open.

An option to roll back to the previous known-good state wouldn't be a bad idea, either.  I mean, it would be lovely to be able to click a button and wait 5 minutes, but I'd settle for *being able to download old versions from somewhere official*.  It's a firewall, FFS, the last thing anyone needs is to be downloading install packages from shady Eastern European websites.

In the end, I decided to put the extra work in, did a fresh install of 2.5.0, proved that it wasn't fundamentally broken, and began the tedious process of iteratively restoring parts of my previous settings until I discovered what was causing the problem (unsurprisingly, the traffic shaper, for those playing along at home).  This provided a much-needed opportunity to tidy up the interface order so the primary WAN wasn't on OPT5.

I'm sure I was planning to do something yesterday, too.  Possibly involving watching NASA littering Mars with robots.

Minor grumble:  apuled.ko doesn't work in the new BSD version, so the blinkenlights are no longer blinking.

[Mr Larrington]

o hai mr larrington!  i haz new driver 4 ur pictures card!

Thus sprach Nvidia.  Click buttons to install.  Put windows back where I want them.  Start game wot was working fine earlier.  Prod “Drive”.  Game crashes.  Swear.  Try again.  Game crashes.  Swear.  Perform “Clean Install”.  Disable Nvidia's sound driver thing because it does not communicate with the noises card wot has the amp attached.  To it.  Start game.  Prod “Drive”.  Game crashes.  Try again.  Game crashes.  Swear.  Download previous version of driver.  Uninstall sound driver bit.  Try to uninstall USB-C bit.  Reboot required.  Swear.  Reboot.  Uninstall USB-C bit.  Try to install previous driver.  Reboot required.  Swear.  Reboot.  Install previous driver.  Start game.  Prod “Drive”.  Game crashes.  Swear.  Start game using different profile.  Prod “Drive”.  All works.  Restart game with profile wot fell over, use various things to travel around the virtual world.  Prod “Drive”.  Drive right past place where game previously crashed.  Park up and exit gracefully.  Reinstall latest driver.  Start game with crashy profile.  Prod “Drive”.  All OK.  Swear.

That's ninety minutes of my life I won’t get back and if I knew who to blame I'd throw them onto the canal tied to Piers “Morgan” Moron, the colossal bellend.

[Kim]

We've all been there.  Apart from the ATI fanboys, I suppose.

On the plus side, you didn't have to grope around for something with a serial port and release the magic smoke from the Psion 5's wall-wart^[1] before realising that that lump under the fettling-desk where your knees are supposed to go is the BHPC's antique babbage-engine with all the 1990s connectors^[1] you could wish for.


_{[1] The Psion was unharmed, thankfuly.
[2] Apart from an Ethernet port that's supported in Windows 10, obviously.}

[Morat]

I just want to buy a new graphics card. OK, it's not the most urgent requirement in the world, and maybe I'm too old to be a PC "Gamer" but I'd like to fly pretend aeroplanes in VR and my Geforce 980 is gasping and panting like a fat kid running for a bus. Or me running anywhere.
But no. I've given my money to the great god SCAN (who shall not be misspelt) and received nothing in return these past five months. It's not their fault if the world has run out of silicon wafers, or is prioritising REAL fighter jets or baby scaring machines or whatever - but it has been somewhat frustrating during these hours and months of "Do Not Leave Your Domicile" which would have presented the perfect opportunity for pretending to be elsewhere, in VR, soaring above the clouds.

[Mr Larrington]

No, Babbage-Devices, taking ten minutes to copy 67 bytes of data across TowersNet is Simply Not On.  Buck yore ideas up, m'laddo or I'll start hunting down replacement hardware…

(Reboots NAS, watches backup revert to “acceptably sprightly”)