Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Greenbank]

Wiped FiL's old computer using DBAN.

Contacted local charity to see if they want it (it's an old Compaq Presario CQ5004UK - 2.2GHz Sempron, 3GB RAM, 160GB HDD, can run Windows 7, WXGA monitor). Not sure if they'll be interested, they seem more interested in laptops/tablets. It doesn't have a Wifi adapter for one although that's solvable for £12 or so.

If they aren't what places/charities might be interested?

[Kim]

MrsT: My printer won't switch on.  So I dive in under her desk and find that the surge arrestor she's plugged it into isn't itself plugged into anything. Cable rationalisation & dust-induced hay-fever ensue.

Bonus points for plugging a UPS into itself in such circumstances.

[pcolbeck]

Babbage-Engine then takes umbrage.  Connects and disconnects disk every three seconds. 

Not enough power being delivered by that USB port.

[Mr Larrington]

Babbage-Engine then takes umbrage.  Connects and disconnects disk every three seconds. 

Not enough power being delivered by that USB port.

It was perfectly happy to do complicated things like jibble partitions and erase contents an' t'ing, but when called upon to Just Sit There

[Mr Larrington]

Thee Cupboard ov Networky Goodness by Mr Larrington, on Flickr

Relocated various bits of network gubbins into the Cupboard Where Old Car Stereos Go To Die.  It all works too.  Amazeballs!

[Lightning Phil]

Disc space getting low on desktop. Little digging around to find out what was eating the space and now have 110Gb free on boot drive.  iTunes had decided to have two identical copies of my music, thank you Apple!  Old photos also moved to my external raid drive which has tonnes of space.

[Afasoas]

The SPOF that is the main homeserver, which runs the virtual firewall and the DNS/DHCP servers on the network hosed its root partition. When I fscked it, every single inode was orphaned   

This of course happened mid-morning on Thursday, at which point we were working from home.
Server duly rebuilt, re-configured (albeit by manually applying settings from ansible scripts) and bind zone files, samba database etc. restored from backups.

I've got a second DNS server running and I'm just applying some changes that will DHCP into a failover pair. That leaves baking in some magic to backup up the firewall virtual machine and restore it onto the backup server as part of the daily backup activity, plus another script that runs periodically on the backup server and fires up the restored firewall VM if the main home server is not reachable. So a repeat instance will mean moving a couple of network cables and turning on the backup server, instead of taking a day off work.

[Lightning Phil]

Uninstalled Edge yesterday, and today windows update decided to put it back.  Just fark off will you?

[Mr Larrington]

That is the nature of Windows updates.  They will also reset your screen saver, put back all the crapps you never use, re-enable OneDrive and Cortina and, on a good bad day, overwrite your Logitech drivers with ones that don't work.

Now, Dropbox.  If I tell you to put my Stuffs in D:\Dropbox do not put it in D:\Dropbox\Dropbox, thereby causing alarums and excursions when I can't find them.  Gits.

[Pickled Onion]

just wrote a script in python to update various software controlled infrastructure doohickeys

 - I haven't written any python for months and kept having to look everything up
 - It has 70 lines of code and 35 of tests
 - fixing pep8 took ages, it seems that xcode doesn't do it as you go.  Yes, I have autopep8
 - You can tell I was for many years a perl programmer, check out this line

found = re.compile(r'(\w*?)_?enabled\s*=\s*(\w+)')

interesting... what does the *? do in the first capture?

[Greenbank]

*? is non-greedy

Given an input of:

argle "this is in "more than one set of" quotes" bargle

^.*(".*").*$

will probably just match " quotes" as the first .* will be as greedy as possible, whereas

^.*?(".*").*?$

will match "this is in "more than one set of" quotes" as the outer .* are marked as non-greedy.

[CommuteTooFar]

I  removed the intake filters on my case and cleaned them. Lots of fluff in the vacuum cleaner.  The front filter was filthy. I was surprised the bottom filter was nearly clean. I suppose the power supply fan rarely runs.

[Greenbank]

Found this page: https://blog.habets.se/2015/03/Scraping-data-from-a-BT-home-hub-5.html to help me scrape speed and byte counters from my broadband router. Been looking for that for ages...

I'll be setting up mrtg/rrdtool tomorrow to get this logged and graphed. Or maybe I should play with Grafana...

[Morat]

The Gaming Machine of Over Ambition is now running on a new PSU. Apparently the new 30 series NVidea cards are reversing the trend of recent years and will need at least an 850W power supply. I've never swapped the PSU on anything apart from an easy-peasy Dell desktop before, but it worked out.
650W out, 1000W in - how retro!
From what I have seen, there are not so many 850W PSUs available right now. Maybe I'm imagining it.

[SoreTween]

A day of maintenance / entropy reversal:

• A couple of months ago my SmartUPS 1500 died, a replacement was obtained very cheaply from eBay (cheap as it had no batteries) and it just got plonked on the office floor. I didn't even put all the usual loads on it. Today I dismantled technology corner, stacked the UPS in its usual spot in the pile and recabled everything properly.
• About a month ago I retrieved the power line adapter from Mrs Tween's studio to give it a firmware update. It failed and the adapter needed a factory reset.  I didn't finish setting it up properly so it's been kicking around the house. Today I completed the setup and returned it to its  rightful home.
• Updated the studio pi which obviously has been uncontactable for a month.
• Updated the pi in my office I use for testing config changes and restarted it scanning the 433 band.  Now that the heating is coming on the readings from the tank level sender will start moving so I need to finish figuring out how to log it.  Also because yesterday I dusted off my efergy power monitor after years of icba. Turns out that may well be 433 too.

[Mr Larrington]

Turned off the PC in the Great Hall on Friday because absent for the weekend. Turned it back on this pm.  Got a Windows logo and a determinedly unmoving white blob instead of the “hang on a sec, I'm doing Stuffs” swirly-thing.  Harsh words ensue.  Off-on.  PC fires up as normal.

Plz to not do that, machine

[Mr Larrington]

Moved Mr Creosote, the NAS wot is on the receiving end of the backups of the PCs on TowersNet, back into the Great Hall, that I might narrow down the cause of networky Stuffs running at about a tenth of their usual speed.  If tomorrow’s backups complete at an acceptable speed then it's likely the switch in the Cupboard o'Disks.  Ethernet cables don't go off, do they?

[Kim]

Ethernet cables don't go off, do they?

Depends on how much wood you've filed from the underside of the landlord's shonky doors...

[Mr Larrington]

Ethernet cables don't go off, do they?

Depends on how much wood you've filed from the underside of the landlord's shonky doors...

I am the landlord.  However, I did close the Chips Room's shonky door, beneath which the string in question passes, when I went away for the weekend, and the problem only manifested itself when I came back on Monday.  Hmmm.

[Kim]

A bit of ping -f while frobbing the door might be prudent...

[ian]

Have you considered wifi, Señor Larrers?

[Mr Larrington]

A bit of ping -f while frobbing the door might be prudent...

A cursory pinging of NAS devices in both locations shews “time<1ms”.  Not very helpful

Edit: did a differential backup just now.  Slightly under 3 minutes as opposed to 8.5 this morning.  Not the switch in the Great Hall then

Have you considered wifi, Señor Larrers?

Yes.  Wifi is why everything that can be connected with string is connected with string. The only things using The Devil's Radio are my phone and fondleslab; some kit would require the installation of unsightly dongles to wifi and some won't wifi at all.

[Kim]

A bit of ping -f while frobbing the door might be prudent...

A cursory pinging of NAS devices in both locations shews “time<1ms”.  Not very helpful

That's where the -f comes in.  Spews packets as fast as unreasonably possible, prints a '.' for each packet sent and a backspace for each packet received.  If your terminal starts filling up with dots, you know something's leaking.

This is particularly helpful as the output can be squinted at from across the room while wiggling wires.

[Diver300]

Ethernet cables don't go off, do they?

The demise of one here was assisted by meece. Unfortunately, I wasn't using PoE wound up to eleven and the perpetrators got away.

[pumpkin]

lots. I do some IT work at a Uni. Comedy gold at times. Currently replacing the covid ridden kybds of yesteryear with new ones covered in a plastic film (so they can be wiped) before those get replaced with medical grade kybds at £100 each and mice at a similar price. Pre covid,nobody cared about those kybds. Full of skin,bogeys, food etc. Now it's a frenzy. prob 2000 upwards being replaced. So 2000+ @100 pound plus o/t at time and a half or double for those who want it. Lots of these machines are locked down incl the peripherals so prob 5 mins at least per machine to unlock/replace/lock. Macs have a slightly different kybd layout but we havent bought Apple specific kybds so people are having issues with eg @ which is in a different place.