Author Topic: Fettled any computer stuff today? (Read 219249 times)

Mr Larrington · « **Reply #375 on:** 24 August, 2015, 03:28:05 pm »

Quote from: davelodwig on 24 August, 2015, 03:05:38 pm

What I don't get is why you feel the need to subsitutue the name of google for something childish like screwgle, G00gle or something else, it's like the people who replace microsoft with micro$oft or microshaft I just find it really stupid. I have friends who work for both firms and they are just folk trying to make products that customers might want to use, sure I might not agree with the management of those firms but trying to be funny with the names is just a bit purile.

The worldwide howls of protest which accompany just about every new release of Windows suggests that Microsith as a corporate entity is not trying hard enough to determine what customers want. Or, perhaps more importantly, what customers don't want.

nuovo_record · « **Reply #376 on:** 24 August, 2015, 03:31:35 pm »

not bought, but just been given a 160gb SSD drive......looking forward to using that little baby

Afasoas · « **Reply #377 on:** 25 August, 2015, 12:44:17 pm »

Quote from: davelodwig on 24 August, 2015, 03:05:38 pm

<snip>

I quite like the search I've always managed to find what I'm looking for among the thousands of messages I've held onto (though owing to subject access requests I purge everything non essential or sensitive from some accounts every six months).

What I don't get is why you feel the need to subsitutue the name of google for something childish like screwgle, G00gle or something else, it's like the people who replace microsoft with micro$oft or microshaft I just find it really stupid. I have friends who work for both firms and they are just folk trying to make products that customers might want to use, sure I might not agree with the management of those firms but trying to be funny with the names is just a bit purile.

D.

My bold. You might 'purge' them but how do you know it's really deleted?
If your emailing sensitive information, how do you know an angered Google employee mightn't release it to the dark web at some point in future?

Sounds sensationalist, but I suspect there are many Ashley Madison users right now who would share the same concerns.

As for calling Google Screwgle, it's a force of habit. I often alter words in content I produce if I don't particularly want that content indexed on that word by a search engine. And as an organisation, I think Google are quite Evil when their philosophy is/was "Don't be Evil". I could cite some of their self-interested lobbying of national governments. Or surreptitious marketing activities. Or poor anonymisation of the search data they collect.

Kim · « **Reply #378 on:** 25 August, 2015, 12:58:40 pm »

Good point. If you're handling data that's sensitive under the DPA, I'd consider it unwise to store it outside the UK. Be it with the Evil Empire^[1] or some random little service provider.

In practice, this happens all the time.

_{[1] Depending on who you ask, this may mean Microsoft, Google or Apple.}

Afasoas · « **Reply #379 on:** 25 August, 2015, 01:21:32 pm »

Quote from: nuovo_record on 24 August, 2015, 03:31:35 pm

not bought, but just been given a 160gb SSD drive......looking forward to using that little baby

Nice

ian · « **Reply #380 on:** 27 August, 2015, 08:14:26 am »

Quote from: Mr Larrington on 24 August, 2015, 03:28:05 pm

Quote from: davelodwig on 24 August, 2015, 03:05:38 pm
What I don't get is why you feel the need to subsitutue the name of google for something childish like screwgle, G00gle or something else, it's like the people who replace microsoft with micro$oft or microshaft I just find it really stupid. I have friends who work for both firms and they are just folk trying to make products that customers might want to use, sure I might not agree with the management of those firms but trying to be funny with the names is just a bit purile.

The worldwide howls of protest which accompany just about every new release of Windows suggests that Microsith as a corporate entity is not trying hard enough to determine what customers want. Or, perhaps more importantly, what customers don't want.

To be fair, if you've got a bazillion customers then even if you please 99% that grumbly 1% is still big and vocal.

Oh, and like all big corporate motherships, they're mostly managed by idiots who are under the impression that their great ideas change things. Being CEO is like trying to steer a supertanker by standing on the prow all Kate Winslet and leaning to starboard with a look of determination on your face.

woollypigs · « **Reply #381 on:** 28 August, 2015, 10:40:53 am »

Randomly clicking about on the laptop, found a folder ... hmm what's in here ... clickty click ... oh a partial copy of my backup USB drive. No idea why it is in there or how it ended up there. Well that freed up a bit over 100Gb.

nmcgann · « **Reply #382 on:** 28 August, 2015, 01:16:27 pm »

Quote from: Afasoas on 24 August, 2015, 08:36:09 am

Got fail2ban configured on the VPS so it actually works properly with SSH/IMAPs. Nice refresher in RegEx.
Also configured the VPS to send an email following a successful SSH authentication.

Next step is installing a webmail client. Any suggestions on which? (SquirrelMail, Horde, RoundCube).

Roundcube. I had run squirrelmail for years, but it doesn't handle html emails well or some emails from Ms outlook that just come up completely blank. Roundcube fixes all those issues and feels much more modern to use.

Main reason for using squirrelmail was that it didn't use mysql and I didn't have any databases on my home server at the time. I do now so that wasn't a consideration any more.

Afasoas · « **Reply #383 on:** 31 August, 2015, 11:34:08 am »

Some more progress with the VPS. NginX installed with a number of virtual hosts. PHP installed and working. And automated backups of logs, MySQL databases and /var/www setup. I've setup a series of single use SSH keys, one for each backup task.

I'll need to revisit and build some more intelligence into these backup scripts at some stage, I only really want to back up /var/www if files have changed and MySQL could be switched to use incremental backups, so I will start tweaking again once these changes are tried and tested.

Next thing I'll do is schedule a backup of all the email folders. Those will be substantially bigger than any of the other backups so will definitely try and get those working incrementally from the off.

Thanks for the advice about Round cube. I'll have a bash at that on Monday lunch time.

matthew · « **Reply #384 on:** 31 August, 2015, 08:11:08 pm »

My boot drive went kaput last week.

I returned to my desktop at home and it wouldn't wake up. On a power cycle the Bios failed to find a boot partition and further examination showed the BIOS couldn't find the disk. So today in went a new 1TB disk and OpenSuse has now gone smoothly on.

Fortunately I have a separate 34GB SCSI drive in there which contains /home so no data lost. I have now made a partition of the big drive called /bhome on which to mirror the home drive.

Afasoas · « **Reply #385 on:** 04 September, 2015, 05:45:30 am »

Sounds like a close call. Do you have anywhere else you can backup your home directory too?

I've been indulging in far too much computer fettling. I have tweaked all my VPS backups so rsync is using --link-dest. In short, I have set up incremental backups on a 30 day rotation, taking advantage of hard links to ensure I don't physically store multiple copies of identical files.

On the home front, a new big black box arrived. I have thrown in mobo, CPU, RAM, Video Card, PSU, 5x HDD and connected everything up. I booted the frankenserver up. All the fans spun up. Hard disks whirred and chatted away for a few seconds. And the beast drew 140 watts* from the wall. There were no diagnostic beeps emitted but neither was anything displayed on the monitor. Next time I look at it I will reset the BIOS with the magic jumper, check all the other jumper settings, try a different monitor, unplug unnecessary components, try a different display adapter.

*Startling amount of electrickery when my current server peaks at 60 Watt on boot and drops to 15 Watt on idle. The Frankenserver is built from components salvaged from the "graveyard" at work with disks coming from my old NAS, my desktop and a Virgin TV box. It is running a 2008/2009 era Intel Core2Quad CPU on an Asus K5B-SE mobo. I am hopefully going to wake it on LAN immediately before the backup Window and shut it down again immediately afterwords, otherwise this would be unfeasible as a server. The 6 Watts of energy it draws when it isn't even switched on is disturbing tho butt.

Tim Hall · « **Reply #386 on:** 04 September, 2015, 05:10:41 pm »

T'other day I got to the bottom of why the external HDD on my Pi kept disconnecting. This after trying different Operating Systems, buying a New! Shiny! 2A! psu and other fiddling about. The USB lead with duff. (probably been cut by Occam's razor).

Afasoas · « **Reply #387 on:** 06 September, 2015, 12:36:05 pm »

Always frustrating when you try the heavy handed approach to fix something yet the true fix is something obvious and simple.

Pleased to say that following a display adapter transplant, FrankenServer is alive. Although I am slightly disappointed it wasn't a motherboard fault, mainly on account it removes my justification for purchasing an Atom based board to reduce its Gigglywatts consumption.

Afasoas · « **Reply #388 on:** 08 September, 2015, 12:00:08 pm »

I spoke too soon.

A number of issues with FrankenServer. The displayAdapters fan gave up the ghost. I replaced the cooler, reinserted the card and it no longer works. Tested the card on the test bench at work and it's fine. Suspicion is a dodgy mobo. The linux installer refuses to mount tje hard disks although the BIOS can see them. The mobo doesn't register all the RAM on boot. And switching SATA mode from IDE to AHCI causes it freeze on boot.

I think a BIOS upgrade would resolve some of the issues, however I'm now at the point where I'm considering sourcing a replacement mobo. Question is, do I find a board compatible with the existing RAM and power-hungry CPU, or do I get spendy with a less power hungry board and CPU?

woollypigs · « **Reply #389 on:** 08 September, 2015, 04:07:26 pm »

Had that gamble a few times, need to upgrade the <insert a computer component that went up in smoke>, nothing compatible with mobo on market anymore, so get new mobo then RAM, CPU, modem, graphic card etc. don't fit and therefore needs upgrading.

matthew · « **Reply #390 on:** 09 September, 2015, 08:00:59 pm »

Quote from: Afasoas on 04 September, 2015, 05:45:30 am

Sounds like a close call. Do you have anywhere else you can backup your home directory too?

I'll mirror it onto a spare partition on the new hard disk, that should make it safe and easy to recover from most things short of a catastrophic loss of the box. The other option is to try and get the tape drive going again for the most critical data.

Afasoas · « **Reply #391 on:** 13 September, 2015, 10:36:14 pm »

An SSD upgrade and extra memory added to a laptop, giving it a new lease of life.

Windows 10 now installed or downloading onto 3 PCs in the household. It is reportedly spyware, so I've been playing wack-a-mole with the DNS server black holing the domains it phones home to. I realise this is probably futile. I suppose there's a silver lining. I've learned about BIND's response policy zones.

I'd also b0rked the mail server installing DSpam. I think I've fixed that but I need to do some more testing. I'm now almost ready to install RoundCube.

tiermat · « **Reply #392 on:** 14 September, 2015, 10:16:45 am »

In a similar (ish) vein, I got my Samsung Galaxy Tab2 back into a useable state by flashing it back to 4.3.3.

Note to those other p5110 owners out there, 5/5.1/5.1.1 is not for this tablet, no matter how much you want it, it sucks goats, big time!

Afasoas · « **Reply #393 on:** 17 September, 2015, 11:57:59 am »

Roundcube is now up and running. And as usual with these things, took longer than it should.

First made the mistake of specifying the imap/smtp server as tls://blah with the imaps/smtps port. The tls prefix means connect using an unsecured connection and then run STARTTLS. Mistake.

What I wanted was the ssl:// prefix, even though SSL is disabled. Ports 465/993 on the mail server will only accept TLS connections.

The next fiasco was around syslog. I configured rouncube to chuck it's error logs out to rsyslog and then added an rsyslog configuration file to spew them out to /var/log/roundcube. Only problem was, this didn't work. Turned out to be a school boy error - rsyslog configuration files will only be detected if they have the right extension. 40-roundcube.conf as oppose to just 40-roundcube.

Finally, the default fail2ban filter didna work so I had to write my own.
I've one remaining tweak - I've got to get roundcube to automatically subscribe users to their drafts/trash/junk folders and then use the for their intended purpose. I might get this done later on, or it might have to wait. I've got to get on with some domestic engineering now, fence painting.

Later this week or over the weekend, I've got a forummers website to migrate onto the VPS. That should be fairly trivial. Then about a week's worth of spare hours nipping and tucking it before s/he can announce it to the world.

TimO · « **Reply #394 on:** 20 September, 2015, 03:35:57 pm »

I dismantled my HP Proliant Microserver, to fit a USB3 PCIe card, since it's built in USB interfaces are all just USB2. It took me longer than it should, since you have to pull the entire motherboard out to fit PCIe cards, and that proved to be more involved than I thought! Once I knew the technique it was easy, but it took a bit of head scratching and fiddling.

I use several full sized Proliant servers at work, and this little one is damned impressive for it's size and cost. It's far better with Ubuntu installed on it, than the underpowered QNAP server I had prior to it, with it's mangled, weird, and somewhat slow ARM version of Linux.

Of course, looking online for the documentation proved to be slightly harder than I thought, when I forgot that the NAS provided the DHCP server, so had to reconfigure the PC with a static IP address and networking configuration. You know you've done that too many times, when muscle memory can type in the subnet masks and DNS servers for you!

At some point I may need to replace the internal power cable with a splitter, since I borrowed the unused optical drive power connector to plug into the USB3 card. The PCIe interface can't provide enough power for USB3, so generally you have to plug in a secondary power connector to make it reliable.

After several reboots, with a screen and keyboard, to sort out a typo in the fstab file, I can now talk to a memory card reader plugged into the USB3 board a lot faster than I could previously.

Afasoas · « **Reply #395 on:** 22 September, 2015, 02:12:32 pm »

The Gen8 Microserver is currently available on eBuyer. And once again I'm toying with the idea of buying one.

I've been playing with a light weight blogging engine called Pico CMS.
I've actually forked it on GitHub and made a couple of changes. Overall, I'm really impressed with how simple it is.

I'd not recommend it for anyone who isn't comfortable editting CSS and PHP. If however you've got even a basic understanding of those things, you will find Pico CMS is well within your comfort zone. Previously I've only dabbled at PHP, but so far I've created my own theme, some new templates and even my own plugin to manage "tagged pages".

woollypigs · « **Reply #396 on:** 22 September, 2015, 02:18:37 pm »

I have just played with Droplets and Grav CMS which uses Markdown for the posts.

Now what shall I use them for?

Afasoas · « **Reply #397 on:** 22 September, 2015, 02:27:40 pm »

Gravity looks like Pico on steroids! Almost a pity I didn't come across it when I was looking for a flat file CMS.

Vince · « **Reply #398 on:** 22 September, 2015, 02:36:17 pm »

The Raspberry Pi media server is up and running. Its the quickest PC build I have ever done.

I tried to install a second DVD reader in the desktop Linux box, to allow me to queueueue up DVDs to transcode over night but for some reason the video output stopped working. Possibly a combination of SATA and IDE devices? No idea.

Afasoas · « **Reply #399 on:** 27 September, 2015, 04:13:09 pm »

I've finally sorted the .css for my tech blog out.
Moral of the story, throw the default theme away and write your own from the ground up.

Comments/feedback welcome:
http://biscuit.ninja/