Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Jaded]

 

Just to add, the records I have been given come in two Word files.

Yes, you guessed it, the compiler used slightly different ways of entering the data  in the two docs...

[David Martin]

Welcome to my life. Non-computer literate biologists who have hand edited a machine generated file, taken it through various permutations and then encoded critical information as colours or font selections in an Excel spreadsheet.

So bad it isn't even wrong.

[Chris S]

Welcome to my life. Non-computer literate biologists who have hand edited a machine generated file, taken it through various permutations and then encoded critical information as colours or font selections in an Excel spreadsheet.

So bad it isn't even wrong.

You think "computer literate" IT pros do it any much differently? 

[Pingu]

People love their spreadsheets 

[perpetual dan]

I got a spareish computer installed with a selection of music software hooked up to digital piano. Ostensibly for Miss Dan the Elder, but I've been wanting to pretend I'm Aphex Twin for a while...

[Mr Larrington]

I'm away for two weeks from Monday.  So I need my laptop to be all happy and up-to-date.  So I switched it on for the first time in three months.

This could take a while...

[SoreTween]

So-far-unsuccessful attempt to revive Windows updates on a laptop. I noticed, this week, that it hasn't been updating since the attempt to get a free upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 failed in the middle of last year.

I'm sure I've read that that is a common problem. I've certainly Googled plenty of solutions for general Windows-doesn't-update issues. Keep trying...

If you find a solution please share, my laptop has been searching for updates since the 25th. I don't think it has managed to get any since September.

[drossall]

Which Windows version? I'm making some progress. It's a case of start the process, fail, Google, start again, get a bit further, Google, repeat ad nauseam.

I know some tricks now that make it get further, but I need to know whether you're looking to update a current version or upgrade to 10. I'm currently trying the latter process.

[SoreTween]

win7, I'm just after the monthly sticking plasters not a fresh set of open wounds.

[Feanor]

To update win 7 to win 10, I'd not rely on windows update.
Download the full offline installer and run that.

But is the free upgrade period not now expired?
Is it even available from windows update now?
You might have to buy it now.

[Pingu]

So-far-unsuccessful attempt to revive Windows updates on a laptop. I noticed, this week, that it hasn't been updating since the attempt to get a free upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 failed in the middle of last year.

I'm sure I've read that that is a common problem. I've certainly Googled plenty of solutions for general Windows-doesn't-update issues. Keep trying...

If you find a solution please share, my laptop has been searching for updates since the 25th. I don't think it has managed to get any since September.

I have the same (?) problem. Start the Win7 update process and it sits looking for updates and nothing else happens :-(

[SoreTween]

Well my laptop has solved itself - in a manner of speaking.  I decided ICBA to sod about fixing WU so I manually downloaded the December update rollup.  Thought I'd do a reboot before installing that and.... it stopped on the post screen.  Pop into the BIOS - no disk detected.  Stick the drive in another machine, drive not detected.  Pish.

OCZ Vector SSD only a couple of years old.  I heard they are unreliable so have been pretty good about backing up stuff from it.  I'll have lost a handful of files no doubt but nothing I'm going to be upset over.

Slapped in one of a pair of Crucial BX200 I bought a while back to zing up my mail server but never got around to, win7 installing (rapidly).  t'other is going in an identical laptop to have something minty on it.

[Mr Larrington]

I'm away for two weeks from Monday.  So I need my laptop to be all happy and up-to-date.  So I switched it on for the first time in three months.

This could take a while...

Updated half a dozen programs.  Updates iTunes.  Twice.  Added a very large number of tunes to iTunes library.  Twice.  Windows updates applied.  Now rebooting.

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, just sort yourselves out!  There is no need to try to add that file to iTunes, because it's a fucking Excel spreadsheet

[Tim Hall]

I'm away for two weeks from Monday.  So I need my laptop to be all happy and up-to-date.  So I switched it on for the first time in three months.

This could take a while...

Updated half a dozen programs.  Updates iTunes.  Twice.  Added a very large number of tunes to iTunes library.  Twice.  Windows updates applied.  Now rebooting.

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, just sort yourselves out!  There is no need to try to add that file to iTunes, because it's a fucking Excel spreadsheet

Perhaps they got Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency for Christmas.

His Anthem software, which is designed as a spreadsheet, but also has a unique feature to convert corporate accounts into music, was extremely popular,

[drossall]

I successfully navigated past the update issues and got to Windows 10. Could have done the same to get to an updated Windows 7, I suspect. Will post on how in the next few days.

There had been a previous attempt to upgrade, when someone failed to take the obvious step of plugging in the laptop It seems that enough was downloaded to allow a free upgrade even now.

[Veloman]

Upgrade to W10 for Community Centre kit was disaster, which may have been due to very poor internet connection that resulted in partial upgrade etc etc.

So took it to local computer shop for everything to be removed and a 'proper' W10 installation.

Collected today and all appears to be working well and a marked difference to the previous version of W10.

[Bledlow]

New PC with W10 is, at last, allowing input in Japanese. I didn't do anything to it for 24 hours, having given up in frustration in my attempts to persuade it to accept Japanese input anywhere except in e-mail subjects & internet searches. Mrs B switched it on, logged in to her account , & it was working. 

I'd preciously copied & installed everything necessary over from the failing old PC, & set the new one up for both of us.

[David Martin]

Got the birdfeeder recording data into a mongodb. Set up an Eve server to easily access the data. Seems pretty smooth. Now just need to set up a simple server to produce an interactive line chart and also to run edge detection on the output to note when a bird lands (the weight data drifts too much to just threshold it.)

[SoreTween]

Just to close out my experience with non functioning windows updates....

After I reinstalled Win7 it behaved exactly as it had before, 2 days of hovercraft mode and not a single update installed.  Remember this is now a brand spanking new Win7 install with nothing at all on it.  Instead of forking around looking for a fix I built a WSUS Offline USB stick.  It's no less tedious & reboot intensive that way but it worked.  Once all the prerequisites were up to date (the reboot intensive part) it got on with installing the 160 or so core updates.  After most of those were on it asked for a reboot again and as soon as I logged back on Windows Update told me updates were available, I finished the job that way.  It's possible it was working after the pre-requisites stage, one of those checks is that Windows Update itself is up to date.  Anyone else struggling to get updates I might well be worth giving WSUS Offline a go, it'll check for any gaps in your update history. 

The second battle once I'd completed that was remembering re-finding the magic trick that allows you to connect to admin shares remotely without totally disabling UAC.  This is it:  https://support.adminarsenal.com/hc/en-us/articles/220533007

[Chris S]

A couple of nervy days as I had to rebuild and bare-metal restore a fairly critical server.

Yesterday was almost completely wasted by me chasing shadows - I just couldn't get Ubuntu Server to install properly, and I was led down all manner of RAID10/UEFI/Grub compatibility alleys, until late in the day I found the USB stick I was using as a source of Ubuntu Server 16.04 was corrupt, and seemed to be installing a fascinating blend of 16.04 and some other release entirely.
Once I'd figured this out, and switched to a different USB stick, all was fine.

Reconnected the backup drive as I was passing the office on my way to the loo last night (the curse advantage of working at home!) and kicked off the restore - goddam it was a relief when all the vms were back in place!

Today I discovered phpVirtualbox - and have been enjoying GUI-goodness, instead of wrangling vboxmanage scripts.

[Feanor]

Sparkly new HP Microserver Gen8 here at Feanor Towers.
Pop in a random HDD from the teetering pile of random HDDs.

Boot up with a CentOS 7 USB stick, and go through the install.
(The installer is really nice. )

Install completes, and it reboots into CentOS.
BOOM.
Emergency mode.
I/O errors like crazy from the HDD. Bother. It was the only decent sized HDD it the Teetering Pile.
Now I think about it, that disk was removed from Junior's PC after corrupting the Windows install on it.
I'd hoped that it was just the Win Install that had shit itself, but sadly it looks like the drive itself is toast.

New HDD required.
And I really wanted to tinker with the new server tonight.

OK, So I found another HDD and I've installed the OS and the basic LAMP stack.

Enough for now.

[Afasoas]

Added a DMZ to my network. Hardened debian on the single core atom NUC and moved it over.
Set-up a Git repository, git-web Jenkins, php, nginx etc. and now I have a project some other folk can collaborate with me on. Huzzah.

Started using a terminal client for IRC, which I leave running the NUC using tmux. I can SSH in from anywhere and catch-up on notifications which is rather nice. I'm tempted to pop a terminal based mail client on there and a couple of other bits (..something for seeding Linux ISOs). Then I can decommission the Brix I've got runnning 24/7.



The DMZ was rather interesting to set-up - couldn't for the life of me to get hairpin NAT to work for traffic running in and back out of the same interface. Not until I changed the NAT mode on the port-forwarding rules to NAT+Proxy rather than pure-NAT. I could have course set-up dnsmasq/bind or bodged the hosts file on the NUC but for various reasons hairpin NAT's my preferred choice just now.

I want to rebuild my Ubuntu 14.04 servers onto Debian Jessie as I've long since decided Canonical suck but that's going to be disruptive to my internal customers. And possibly more than weekend's work given the madness of my set-up (virtualized pfSense).

[De Sisti]

Like the idea of having my own server. Wonder how easy and practical it is to create one?

[Thor]

Android can kill your broadband.  Or so I found out today.

Start to lose wifi this morning.  Most devices losing internet access.

After rebooting router, all OK for  a couple of mins, then trouble again.  Reboot separate modem.  Same problem. 

Router showing high CPU usage on one core.

What the hell, upgrade router firmware.  Problem reappears shortly after.

After a while, notice that Mrs Thor, who is home working, is not as disrupted as me.  She has 5GHz wireless card in PC.  I do not.  Curious.

2.4GHz radio on router has gone screwy?  Disable 2.4 GHz on router.  Problem goes away.  Hurrah.  Except that most of my network clients don't have 5GHz capability :-(

With great difficulty, modify old BT home hub to act as 2.4GHz wireless access point, muttering to self that Netgear R7000s are too expensive to have to get a new one every 2 years.  As soon as I plug home hub into router, problem reappears.  2.4GHz is off on router, but the same symptoms are appearing. WTF?!

Destroy BT home hub with lump hammer.  Wasn't its fault, but I felt slightly better.

Change 2.4GHz network password on router, re-enable 2.4GHz radio.  Start re-introducing 2.4GHz clients, PC first - OK, Android phone next - BLAM - problem reappears.  My phone is killing my router?!  Install virus checker on phone (via 3G mobile, cos phone only has 2.4GHz wifi and that kills the router).  Virus checker finds nothing.  "Have you tried turning the phone off and on again?" says Mrs Thor.  So I do just that and all is normal again.  This, at 4:30pm. 

Android can kill your router.  QED.

[Afasoas]

Like the idea of having my own server. Wonder how easy and practical it is to create one?

Essentially it can be as easy as buying a Synology NAS and plugging it in.
But it's a slippery slope.

I like having the centralized storage and centralized backup. It doesn't matter than whether I'm on the desktop or the laptop, I can just get on with the same piece of work.
I also like ripping DVDs/BluRays and stashing them on the media server. We can start watching something on TV downstairs and finish watching it in bed, playing seamlessly on one device from the same point we stopped it on another. The DVDs etc. can just go in the loft once they're ripped.

Privacy is something I care a great deal about, so the DNS server is configured to black hole a lot of domains used for tracking and the firewall/Wi-Fi arrangement means I can easily join any device to a Wi-Fi network that gets all it's traffic shunted over VPN. If anything, avoiding the growing and flawed censureship of HM Government gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

It's also nice that I can VPN into home from anywhere and access anything I need to. I appreciate I could just use Google Drive or Dropbox etc. but I'm adverse to large organisations monetizing the data they collect about me.

The only down side is the power consumption. I've got it down to ~85W, which isn't too bad considering  there's a 24 port managed switch, UPS, two proper servers, two modems and a Wi-Fi access point. I'll also be able to reduce it further still when I've got cash for a more efficient power supply in the backup server and a more efficient UPS. Decommission the Brix will slice 8W off it too.

You can always start with a RaspPi and an external HDD if you just want to try something cheaply.