Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Mr Larrington]

I got as far as the second sentence before it all turned into a version of Aramaic written in a colour only visible to bees.

[Kim]

I got as far as the second sentence before it all turned into a version of Aramaic written in a colour only visible to bees.

Occupational hazard, I'm afraid, but sometimes it precipitates into clarity with comments like:

      /*
       * Here's a totally undocumented fact for you. When the
       * RealTek chip is in the process of copying a packet into
       * RAM for you, the length will be 0xfff0. If you spot a
       * packet header with this value, you need to stop. The
       * datasheet makes absolutely no mention of this and
       * RealTek should be shot for this.
       */

[woollypigs]

In my quest to get my laptop to work a wee bit faster, naaaa alot faster. I have tried all the Ubuntu flavours I could find and then went to vanilla Debian/openbox via Crunchbang.

Today I saw on my random clicking about, that people have got Androd and Chrome OS to run on x86 laptops.

Tried out Remix OS, no dual screen/monitors, from USB stick, still alpha, but it ran and loaded Chrome Browser and pages much faster.

Tried out a version of Chromium OS from Neverware/Cloudready, on USB HDD(USB 2.0, 5400 rpm), slow'ish to boot and start browser, but when up and running, lighting fast to load Google sheets, Gmail and farcebook. Even had access to my files on laptop drive, played filums that Debian/VLC struggled with. One problem it could not see channel 12 on the WiFi.

Since I pretty much live in a browser and have signed my life to G. I'm think ng my next step is to set up dual booton the laptop drive (7200rpm and no USB to run over)

[woollypigs]

Well I gave up on the dual boot with Debian and Chromium OS, even though I did like the Chromium OS. But there is still a few things I would like to be able to do which I could't find an option for in Chromium OS. And the settings of the dual boot was just above my head to get it working.

I really liked old CrunchBang, so I gave it the new version Bunsenlabs yesterday. Lo and behold this is the very first OS/disto that I have used that found and used my wifi card (Broadcom B43) right at the start/install. Which always had me dragging a CAT6 across the room to download the driver and beat it into submission. Bunsenlabs asked which SSID and password and on we went.

I gave the gparted live CD/USB a go too, why didn't I know that years ago, that could have helped cutting down some serious faffing/fettling time.

[tiermat]

Replaced an aging AMD system with the second of my Pis. All powered up and configured, it now serves up files faster and more reliably than the old system. This could be because the old system was at the other end of a powerline adapter, but the new one  sits on the main switch.

[Afasoas]

How is the Pi firewall?
A colleague recently setup a Pi as a filerserver. He complained his file transfer speeds topped out at 8Mb/s, which I don't think is too unreasonable given the 100Mbs fast ethernet via USB ensemble the Pi sports. What sort of benchmarks are you able to achieve?

Today should have been about replacing the rear brake hoses on the old motor ahead of it's MOT, but as the weather was a bit pants I deferred that until tomorrow. Instead I fixed the firewall config backups. Then installed and configured Monitorix on my VPS boxen, so now I've got performance graphs and rudimentary* email alerts.

That still leaves me with fixing the product catalogue on Johns-Bikes and properly configuring spamd. The latter should be priority considering I am getting >5 spam emails a day masquerading as invoices from companies I've never dealt with or scans scanned documents from Canon or HP MFPs.

*Rudimentary in that if the servers mailqueue/CPU is deluged etc. I won't get the email. Acceptable for my uses, but for more critical situations I'd use Nagios

[Mr Larrington]

Seagate's Personal Cloud NAS drives are perfectly sized to fit in the space between the amp and the end of the wossname it lives in, but they also run quite hot, so if left to sit on the base of the wossname or one on top of another thermodynamics can't cope and they overheat and shut down.  Which is a pain in the bum.  Thus I have confected some little supports to increase the space under each drive; one set from some mysterious Babbage mounting hardware which crept out of a box in the Lesser Bedchamber and the other from four surplus-to-requirements chainring bolts

Anything to avoid finding the hacksaw blades...

[woollypigs]

Take care out there Mint has been hacked.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994

[Mr Larrington]

It seemed to be a good idea to jibble the music libraries such that each track has but one piece of cover art associated with it.  This, on the main library, took all of ten minutes.

Alas something has scrambled iTunes' little brane to the extent that doing the lo-res library which exists solely to feed the iPod took all night

As soon as that cheque clears I'm getting the bits to upgrade the 60 GB iPod to a 512 GB SSD

[Kim]

Smoke detectors.

They're a wireless mesh network, which means - like all computing devices - they're subtle and quick to anger, and you have to determine how to actually operate them by watching random YouTube videos and second-guessing the destructions.

It turns out that removing a faulty detector from the network requires a complete brain-wipe of every linked unit and re-mantling the network from scratch (a process involving much point-blank beepiness, the use of a random LED leg^[1] to prod reset buttons, and step ladders).  Otherwise they just sit there pining for the absent detector, which means we have to plonk Percival on top of the strobe unit's 'fault' blinkenlight in order to get a proper night's sleep.

Bah.


_{[1] I've misplaced my official Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia optical disc ejection tool.}

[Mr Larrington]

AirPlay decided it didn't want to talk to the AirPort Express in the Chips Room any more.  Much consultation of the Mega-Global Chocolate Manufactury Corporation of Mountain View, USAnia determined that Babbage-Engines speaking IPv6 won't play nicely with the AE which, to be fair, is so ancient that the Fucking Manual still speaks of iTunes v4.

Clicky clicky and Lo!  A Perfect Circle vacates the Great Hall and takes up residence in the Chips Room   Next on the list is to try to sort out ARC on the anbaric distascope once and for all.

[Mr Larrington]

Next on the list is to try to sort out ARC on the anbaric distascope once and for all.

I give up

(Gives up)

Sometimes turning the distascope on wakes up the receiver and sometimes it doesn't.  "Audio system active" it says, followed closely by "Lost contact with audio system" or somesuch.  But it still works using the optical string.  Brand new "High Speed" HDMI cable from a reputable manufacturer

[Afasoas]

Came home to find my always-on Brix running Mint was not responsive. I gave it a hard kick and the BIOS complains that no bootable media was found. Pulled the disk and mounted it in another machine. I could mount root and home partitions but the boot partition was fishy.

Made a couple of quick/fuitle attempts to rescue the boot partition, but a partition check was vociferously bemoaning about overlapping and generally twisted partitions.

Reinstalled OS and away we go again. All a bit suspect as the device hadn't been subject to any random power failures or hard reboots.

[tiermat]

Came home to find my always-on Brix running Mint was not responsive. I gave it a hard kick and the BIOS complains that no bootable media was found. Pulled the disk and mounted it in another machine. I could mount root and home partitions but the boot partition was fishy.

Made a couple of quick/fuitle attempts to rescue the boot partition, but a partition check was vociferously bemoaning about overlapping and generally twisted partitions.

Reinstalled OS and away we go again. All a bit suspect as the device hadn't been subject to any random power failures or hard reboots.

Might it be worth umounting /boot, after boot time? would save any spurious disc errors.  Or have /boot on different media (SD Card or the like)

[Afasoas]

I think the boot partition is mounted read only anyway, so I'm not sure what difference mounting it would make.
I haven't got the foggiest how it wound up in that state with a completely corrupt partition table, except for close to failing hardware. It's uptime was measured in months.

[Morat]

I've finally fettled my new laptop into something more useful than the 32Gb SSD c: for Windows and 1Tb spinny drive for... stuff.

It's now running an 120Gb M.2 SSD  (M Key, the 4 lane PCIE sort) for C: and a 500Gb 2.5" SSD for D:

I learnt a lot about M.2 SSDs, and the UEFI boot process as I went. That's code for AGAGGGHGHHHNNNNNGGGHHHHHHH WHY WON'T YOU JUST AAAGGGGHHHHHHH x lots. I have now enhanced my calm and the teeny tiny T5 torx are all back in the bottom of the machine. All of them. HAH.

This result means I'm happy it was worth it



Lawks!

[T42]

Oh, the infinite satisfaction of detaching the ball & chain of Windows XP from my limping laptop and installing a shiny new Ubuntu.

Yesterday it took around 20 minutes to reach a point where Firefox would start, today less than a minute.  Delight!

[Phil W]

Written A nodejs  server to listen on a tcp socket for incoming connections from my newly purchased GPS tracker and save result to database.  GPS set to deep sleep between updates meaning the tracker can last a week on a single charge, and hourly updates. Longest time spend working out the server / GPS exchange as not clearly documented and so many clones out there.

[woollypigs]

Hmm in my quest to install on my 'puter the right codec and a newer version of ffmpeg, so that it could play mp4's. I somehow lost my volume control in the task bar and it's normal behaviour e.g. click on it and drag the slider up or down. Now I have click on it, click volume control, wait for sound settings to pop up, then slide slider.

But the weirder and much better news is that chrome now will load pages like farcebook, youtube and gmail much faster. Even managed to get it to play a youtube clip without swearing at the image not being synced to the sound and the constant buffering.

Now do I dare to reboot ...

[woollypigs]

oh forgot to say, it still don't play the mp4 ...

[StuAff]

Yesterday and today, setting up and rooting the second-hand Moto X Play I got on a little-known auction site.
Nexus tools Mac version installed (wish I'd found that before installing all the stuff Motorola said I needed..oh well). In the morning, boot loader unlocked (easy, as normal)...wiped all the data I'd just installed, but not that much bother.  But after that, went a bit wibbly-wobbly. Used phone as a music player/internet device at work that afternoon/evening, decided to root after I got home (1030ish). Recovery didn't install, or didn't appear to. After multiple reboots I eventually worked out I had to go into fastboot first, then boot into the TWRP recovery from there. Then I tried rooting it....get Super SU, install from the recovery....phone won't boot, sticks on the 'you have unlocked the bootloader' warning, except holding down the volume key to go into fastboot. By this stage it's 1230 am, and I call it a day. Today, get the stock 6.0 ROM from XDA (Motorola don't have it on their site, unlike the 1st gen Moto G ones I've needed in the past), restore that with fastboot from the Mac. And she boots. Yay! Defaults into fastboot, time and again... get that fixed. Let it download all the apps etc. Then I try SuperSU, after I've done a backup this time (!), bricks the standard install. Try multiple versions of SuperSU to no avail, multiple TWRP restores ensued. A bit of a learning curve to get everything Just So with least effort. Eventually try an older version of SuperSU (2.62 rather than the current 2.68), and it worked. Yay!
And relax......

[woollypigs]

Android phone was full and had google picasa/photos or what ever it is called now installed. Looks like all the photos has uploaded to the "cloud" as a backup. Fired up Picasa on the win8.1 to download them all, used to be able to do that. Picasa kept telling me some error, looked up, checked the folder I wanted to save photos too. Somehow the folder and others in win8.1 is read only, eh?. User is admin and I set up win8.1 in the day. File/folder permissions is not something that a once in a while user would accidentally click enable to. Could not set it back to read and write, just kept turning back to read only.

Somewhat managed to download files from phone, one by one, I think, but same error came up again and again, no matter where I kicked. I didn't have time to try out all the other error fixing ideas I found online.

Finally gave up on the picasa download, plugged the phone into the win8.1 to find that there is no photos on the phone, they live in the cloud. Do my head in!

Is there a nice photo manager for win8.1, since it looks like picasa, like so many other project/programs by G, is dying. You can upload with a nice backup tool from win8.1 to google photos but you can only download them one by one. Or as a zip file if you have organized them into folders online via browser on phone app. I think, but user of win8.1 and me are old school, like to keep files on hard disk too.

[Afasoas]

A couple of small wins.

Email server will now reject any email that fail an SPF check.
Fixed my dovecot configuration so that the antispam plugin works.
Server-side filtering of email courtesy of dovecot-sieve. Emails for some very chatty mailing lists now get automatically filed.


In other very dull news, VPN's certificates have expired. I'll have to get them renewed tonight.
And the quad port Intel NIC has arrived so I can set about virtualising my firewall.

On Edit: And for the big win. The virtualised firewall is up and running. The old physical firewall is switched off - which has reduced the power consumption of my home infrastructure by 131 kwh/year - that's £15 off the annual electricity bill. PCI pass through of the network card was more tricky than I imagined, but I'm genuinely surprised to have the job done in one evening.

[Phil W]

In case you missed it, let's encrypt which provides free TLS certs for your website is now in public beta. Just gone past one million certificates.

https://letsencrypt.org

[woollypigs]

I signed up and got one, but can't install it on my host, oh well