The computing stuff rant thread

[Gattopardo]

Finally sorted the issue with several reboots.

Then the thing decideds that windows is not authentic...re enter the number again a few times till it finally accepts it.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Effing Windows.

New laptop for daughter, turned on for first time. set up users, etc '00s of updates, reboot. 167 more updates. Over an hour installing them, then it fails - starts rolling back the updates. It isn't going to be finished when I want to go home. I don't want to leave it out on a desk, we've had breakins. Effing windows.

[Mr Larrington]

Don't.  Somewhere between Enfield and Larrington Towers is a new 8.1 box...

[mrcharly-YHT]

Problems turned out to be due to bios bugs, fortunately fairly easily sorted by running the ASUS BIOS/system update utility.

I'm guessing that's why the laptop was a 'refurb'; if someone who wasn't persistent had got it, it would have looked like junk. Was crashing to bios settings every time it was put to sleep.

[Mr Larrington]

Don't.  Somewhere between Enfield and Larrington Towers is a new 8.1 box...

Updates went pretty quickly.

Updates to MS Orifice and other bits'n'bobs, OTOH, is a different wossname of kippers. 171 updates and the thick end of 4 gig chiz

ETA: Reboot.  44 more updates.  1.7 GB.  Poo.

[ian]

Don't knock it, El Capitan is rollocking my fat pipes with six muthahumpin' gigabytes of throbbing upgrade. The neighbourhood's porn will be a buffering.

I'll make a cuppa then. Odds on it gets to 6.07 GB and runs headlong into a chunky error message.

[ian]

Six hours. I slept through it.

Microsoft Office, it took you five years to debut the optimistically named Office 2016 for Mac. One that might actually work with a modern Mac (I reserve judgement). Hold on, £120 for one computer? It's forever 1995 in Microsoftland.

Or I can subscribe. I don't want to subscribe to software.

Bugger off then, I'll stick with 2011 and liberal usage of foul language.

[Pingu]

Javascript: gah! 

[StuAff]

Six hours. I slept through it.

Microsoft Office, it took you five years to debut the optimistically named Office 2016 for Mac. One that might actually work with a modern Mac (I reserve judgement). Hold on, £120 for one computer? It's forever 1995 in Microsoftland.

Or I can subscribe. I don't want to subscribe to software.

Bugger off then, I'll stick with 2011 and liberal usage of foul language.

2011 still works just fine (OK, no worse than previously) with El Cap.
+1 on the price and the subscription model. I just want to buy software as and when, and at a reasonable price. Adobe lost my business when they switched Photoshop to subscriptions, when I'd bought multiple upgrades over the years.

[Vince]

Adobe, why can't you write software that doesn't need to be upgraded every 3.5 minutes? Flash is a pile of doggy doo.

[Mr Larrington]

How iTunes does it:

• Reads metadata from music files
• Organises library according to what it finds

How Plex Media Server does it:

• Reads metadata from music files
• Organises music library according to what it finds
• Looks on Internets because it can
• Decides that a 1993 album called "Oscar" is really a 2003 album called "Luxor", because they've both got five letters and end with an "r"; adds tracks from former to latter
• Doesn't ask your permission to do this either
• Or even tell you that it's done it
• And makes it almost totally fucking impossible to correct

I give up

(Gives up)

[Feanor]

Oh, dear. I seem to be a spam-spewing zombie.

Complaint from Mrs. F that she's had no e-mail for 2 days.
So I send her a test mail.
Nothing.
I send myself a test mail.
Nothing.

Hmm.
Log onto mail server, and find it's bogged down with a delivery queue of 6000 messages.
Shut down the mail service, clear queue, and look at logs.

I've got logging turned down to 1, so I can only see that I've been accepting mail from spammy address to random address ( ie open relaying ).
Only I'm not open relaying, I require SMTP auth.
So I think one of the client PCs is compromised and the mail is coming in via an authenticated connection.
I've turned on SMTP logging so I can catch which login is compromised.
It's not a dictionary attack, since I have an IP auto-ban for incorrect logins.

Server re-started, and nothing untoward coming in yet.
Will be keeping a close eye on this one.

[Feanor]

Oh, dear. I seem to be a spam-spewing zombie.

Complaint from Mrs. F that she's had no e-mail for 2 days.
So I send her a test mail.
Nothing.
I send myself a test mail.
Nothing.

Hmm.
Log onto mail server, and find it's bogged down with a delivery queue of 6000 messages.
Shut down the mail service, clear queue, and look at logs.

I've got logging turned down to 1, so I can only see that I've been accepting mail from spammy address to random address ( ie open relaying ).
Only I'm not open relaying, I require SMTP auth.
So I think one of the client PCs is compromised and the mail is coming in via an authenticated connection.
I've turned on SMTP logging so I can catch which login is compromised.
It's not a dictionary attack, since I have an IP auto-ban for incorrect logins.

Server re-started, and nothing untoward coming in yet.
Will be keeping a close eye on this one.

Aha! Caught!

After 2 quiet days on the mailserver, I am alerted to a sudden spike in mail traffic.
Remote onto the mailserver, and I see spam from: and to: addresses being relayed.
Shuts down mail server service, and peruses the more comprehensive logs.

Ah, so there we are: logging in with a legit account, and getting authenticated.
So who's account is it?   One of the kids, no doubt.
But it's base64-obfuscated in the logs, so I need to decode it... <tapity-tap>

Ah.
Not the kids.
It's my primary account.  How embarrassing.

I have a strong password, don't I? Err.. no...
I forgot that back at Xmas time, when I got the new fondleslab, in my haste to set up stuff, I could not remember my e-mail account password.
So I just remoted into the mailserver and 'temporarily' reset it to 'username123', intending to fix it later.
Later never came, and I just adjusted my password on my other devices.
So I've been running with this silly PW for 10 months.

It's been reset to a strong PW again, and I've temporarily firewalled out the IP that was hitting me.
I'll remove the IP block after a week or so, once they have given up.

Dearie me.  What an idiot.

[davelodwig]

When I find the idiot that thought such dramatic changes in the way apache is configured under ubuntu for the upgrade from 12.10 LTS to 14.04 LTS I will tear there legs off.

Oh what fun to find none of the sites work because of virtual host incompatibilities such as files needing .conf adding to the end.

4 hours of my life I'm not getting back.

[Feanor]

Oh, My.
The fun of running your own mailserver.

After shutting down a vulnerability of my own causing, I'm now dealing with the fallout.

The mail server logs are full of failing attempts to do SMTP auth.
Previously, I had default settings for auto-ban, where 3 incorrect logins over a few minutes got your IP a 1-hour ban or somesuch.

That's not realistic in my setup.
There are less than 10 users, and they all have their credentials set up and stored on their devices.
There's *no* reason for incorrect logins.

So now 1 incorrect login gets a 2 week IP ban.
I'm assuming a compromised Consumer PC on an dynamic IP.
I may extend this to months.
No real MX machines will be affected, they don't attempt to auth.

Connections on the LAN are exempt from this.

I've noticed that dictionary-attacks seem to have become auto-ban aware, and back off their connection attempts accordingly.
Sneaky buggers.

[Zipperhead]

I used to think that TFS was the worst SCM that I'd ever used, but no, it has been replaced in my "affections" by git.

Git, it's name even rhymes with shit.

Trying to do such relatively simple things has annoyed me so much that I find myself agreeing with Adolf* (on this at least)

"oh it's so fast" say the developers. Well it's not if you have to waste 30 minutes cloning the repository because there''s no way back. Oh yes, it's fine if you want to ponce around with your macbook.

So fucking arcane and illogical is it that to do something trivial I've now resorted to cloning a fresh dev VM, cloning the git repository on it and then making 4 clones of that VM, which I'll throw away later.

* https://goo.gl/WvCVPs

[Maverick]

Memory Map and Windows! MM - why do you refuse to develop a OSX desktop app forcing me to use Windows. This has been a no-windows zone for 5 years so it was necessary to dig out a copy and install it on a VM on my iMac. Consequently it took 5 hours of my life to split a copy of the 50k GB 2015 Hd maps in to small enough chunks to load onto iPhone/iPad, most of it playing 'hunt the network' and 'where is the USB port'. That should be a 10min job!! 

[mcshroom]

If you are pulling data of the same sensors, from the same SCADA system, is it too much to ask that you keep the dates in the same bloody format?

I have 320,000 rows of imported CSV data to try and turn into something inteligable in excel* and all I've been doing for the last half hour is trying to fix the switches from USAnian dates to UK ones which is messing up my attempts to do any sorting and processing.

*That I have to us Excel and not Access for something that Access would be far better at is another rant for another time

[Pingu]

Dates in Excel - hours of fun 

[Phil W]

Memory Map and Windows! MM - why do you refuse to develop a OSX desktop app forcing me to use Windows. This has been a no-windows zone for 5 years so it was necessary to dig out a copy and install it on a VM on my iMac. Consequently it took 5 hours of my life to split a copy of the 50k GB 2015 Hd maps in to small enough chunks to load onto iPhone/iPad, most of it playing 'hunt the network' and 'where is the USB port'. That should be a 10min job!! 

You know you really want Anquet which has OSX and iOS versions...

[TheLurker]

Microsoft.  Visual Studio 2015.  Pointless fucking changes to UI cf VS 2012.  That is all.

[Mr Larrington]

After beating the SCIENCE about the head with my stoutest knobkerrie I have persuaded the audio versions of all five John Peel Lectures to take up residence on my Babbage-Engine.  So, iTunes, I wish to import all five into your stupid so-called "library" that I might then put them on my iPod and listen to them in mine own good time while out.  Or about.

Therefore I should be obliged if you should treat all five files in the same way i.e. as if they were tracks wot I had for e.g. ripped from a CD.  Or something.  Rather than leaving poor Iggy out in the cold under "Podcasts".

I have now managed to get Mr Pop alongside Ms Church and Messrs Townshend, Bragg and Eno but only by frobbing the file until it screamed.  Just stop it.  You are the Louise Woodward of nanny-state-ism

[David Martin]

Dates in Excel - hours of fun 

Dates in any package are painful. My weapon of choice for such shenannigans is either R or Python.

[Mr Larrington]

Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, you have raised twattery to new levels.

My fondleslab wants to upgrade to iOS 9.1.  Now or later, it asks.  Later, I say, fo I am using it to look make up random "facts" about Croydon.  Between 2 and 4 tomorrow, then, it says, provided it's plugged in and has wi-fi rays. I plug it in and bung it on the coffee table, two metres as the well-aimed half-brick flies to the wifi router.  Mr Jobs' SCIENCE will do its stuff and I can come down in the morning for tea, toast and iOS 9.1.

I do not what made it not update but the first thing it asks this morning is whether I want to update to iOS 9.1.  Look, FruitCo, If you're going to offer this service then make it fucking work, and if it doesn't find conditions to its liking then at least give me a fucking error message.  Cretins.

In contrast it decided to do the last update unilaterally.  While I was on holibobs.  In a hotel with shite wifi.  Which caused it to conk out and turn the fondleslab into a paperweight.

"Lobotomised shitlarks" is not too strong a description of the people responsible.

[Mr Larrington]

And now I find that press'n'hold no longer works for "quotes" and catastrophe's.  You have to press, hold and jibble your finger