Fettled any computer stuff today?

[SoreTween]

Hell will most certainly freeze over before Google has anything to do with my email

I use surgemail on the lowest paid tier with approximately bi-annual renewal. The free one would do these days but all the time my company still functions I may as well leave as is. Plus having support available seems to be an effective way of avoiding anything going wrong. Surgemail is vastly^massively OTT for my needs but it just works.

I very much hope the transition from Windows version to Linux is as simple as their help claims.

[Greenbank]

Given so many people use google for their email Google probably gets to read half of your email anyway.

[vorsprung]

My mail server is better at not losing mail than Plusnet, better at not hiding things than Google, has effectively unlimited storage and is faster than my internet connection.  Given that it's a toss up between hosting it locally or paying for an equivalent service elsewhere, I consider it the path of least resistance.  Of course, there isn't any Windows involved, which helps.

When I ran my own mail server at home I did have an MX secondary elsewhere with a 2 week queue
I had to pay for that of course

[Kim]

Given so many people use google for their email Google probably gets to read half of your email anyway.

Well yes, but at least they're not randomly hiding your incoming mail because it looks like it came from an automated system or mailing list.

(I'm also of the old-fashioned school of email users, who use IMAP folders effectively.  Gmail's search and categorisation stuff is much less useful to me than it is to the chaotic inbox people.)

Of course, for Google to read your email, you've first got to persuade them to accept it.  They've been taking a leaf out of the Hotmail playbook in recent years, and you need to be fairly fanatical about SPF and DKIM.

When I ran my own mail server at home I did have an MX secondary elsewhere with a 2 week queue
I had to pay for that of course

I have an arrangement to do secondary MX (and offsite backups) on a server in exchange for occasional unisex spaceadministry.

TBH, I think secondary MXes are less important than they used to be, in that most sending servers will retry for 48 hours or so.  It's the longer  - probably planned - outages where they become important.

[Ham]

Yes, I out-source the spam filtering in hMailServer to various 3-rd party services.
But I can instantly white-list any false positives at my whim.

....almost as quick as adding an email address to contacts 

I do understand how some would prefer not to use Google, but I'd suggest that control over spam shouldn't be one of the reasons.

[drossall]

I run Mercury/32, and route mail as above via Plusnet's server. There are good reasons not to allow mail to go out directly.

[Feanor]

Most bizarre thing today.
On my work laptop, my Roundcube Webmail started playing up.
The page loaded, but the Inbox folder failed to populate, with "Server Error - Access Denied" messages.

Logging onto other user accounts on the same server worked OK.
Connecting to the Webmail server from another device ( same browser!) worked OK!

After trying many, many things, it turned out to be a problem with one specific message.
Deleting it from another client fixed everything.

[Kim]

Bash script for uploading GPX files to Strava.

I'd been using one that was mentioned by a forumite to good effect for ages, but at some point last year they changed the API and b0rked the authentication.

In the absence of anything better to do, I sat down with the relevant docs and cURL and worked out how to authenticate.

Having achieved that, I started tweaking things, so it's now many hours later a bit more featureful than I actually need.  But I've probably learned something about bash's semi-comprehensible handling of quotes, or at least how to avoid the worst of it.  Not that I'll remember any of it for next time.

ETA: https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=115548.0 refers

[Afasoas]

Yes, I out-source the spam filtering in hMailServer to various 3-rd party services.
But I can instantly white-list any false positives at my whim.

....almost as quick as adding an email address to contacts 

I do understand how some would prefer not to use Google, but I'd suggest that control over spam shouldn't be one of the reasons.

I can whitelist an mailing list. That's awkward to manage via contacts.
And, to be honest, there are many good reasons for not using mainstream mail providers. Especially as they can't keep their own email servers off black lists, which makes the whitelisting even more of a boon.

[SoreTween]

Completed changing out all the 'wrong' colour patch leads in the network, different colour per VLAN.  OCD tendencies satiated for now.

[SoreTween]

Woohoo!  I'm windows free¹

Server video card upgraded to a GTX1650, total overkill for the job it needs to do but that way the fans never run.  It's sitting not far above ambient whereas the fanless card it replaces used to sit ~ 83ºC
Memory upgraded - turned out it only had 2Gb not 4, it now has 16.  Thank you to Maverick for your offer of help with this   It took 4 attempts to get RAM that would work, it is one fussy motherboard. I still think Corsair suck donkey balls for selling significantly different RAM (different number of chips and different SPD data) with the same part number and appearance.  The one set sold on ebay so far has recovered my costs inc postage, fingers crossed for the other two sets.
Test installation of Mint & surgemail blow away & all reinstalled fresh.
With a little help from technical support, Surgemail moved from Windows to Linux

Now here's the kicker, Surgemail right up to the latest version was running just fine thank you very much on Windows XP.  Sometime around late 2011 I upgraded the hard disks in it to 500Gb hybrids but only allocated 78Gb to XP (and today 62Gb are still free). The rest of the space sat untouched waiting for me to install 7.

Surgemail absolutely flies on the new installation.  It was fast on XP, the last truly cruft free (or freeable) OS to come out of Redmond.  But with SSDs instead of hybrids, 6Gb/sec PCIE card instead of the 3Gb/sec mobo controller and the RAID card being capable of parallel reads (I get about 8.5Gb/sec off them) it is delicious.  If you run RAID I strongly recommend picking up an old Adaptec off the bay of E, at £25 for the card and £15 for the cable (the £3 cables on the bay don't work) they are silly cheap. 

Server should be good for many more years, certainly to the EOL of Mint 19 in 2023.

¹ Lie, I still have:
- a laptop on Win 7, this will be my only 'available' Win machine.  It'll just sit there Justin.  The laptop I use is identical and was the 1st machine Minted up several years ago.
- Dual boot on the desktop.  Win7 now only gets used for reading my thermochrons and that'll end if I ever get java and the Maxim reader working on Mint.
- Dual boot on the server but it'll never go back to Windows unless something catastrophic happens.
Also in the house there is:
- Mrs Tween's Win 10 laptop - awful thing.  Going to be minted when I get time.
- Mrs Tween's old laptop - considerably less awful so that'll stay 10
So if all goes to plan eventually the only Win hardware in this house will be our 2nd fiddle laptops.

[Afasoas]

Completed changing out all the 'wrong' colour patch leads in the network, different colour per VLAN.  OCD tendencies satiated for now.

You aren't the only one!

Purple	Blue	Green	Yellow	Orange	Red	Brown
trunk	LAN	Manglement	CCTV	DMZ	WAN	RIPE Atlas

[tiermat]

Took a Mac Mini and upgraded it to Yosemite then on to Mile High Stadium, or some such (can you tell that the OSX naming convention means nothing to me?).

Then managed to install Jenkins, add a runner and start creating jobs. Unfortunately I then ran into an issue with certificates. Which I fixed! W00t!!! 111

Why all this, I hear you ask. Well it's a project for the new job and as I have a couple of weeks of garden leave I may as well play!

[ian]

Took a Mac Mini and upgraded it to Yosemite then on to Mile High Stadium, or some such (can you tell that the OSX naming convention means nothing to me?).

Things in California (Santa Catalina is an island off the coast, near LA, quite a pleasant day trip). The next release is, however, 'Fresno Crack House.'

[Mr Larrington]

Took a Mac Mini and upgraded it to Yosemite then on to Mile High Stadium, or some such (can you tell that the OSX naming convention means nothing to me?).

Things in California (Santa Catalina is an island off the coast, near LA, quite a pleasant day trip). The next release is, however, 'Fresno Crack House.'

Could be worse.  Could be 'Oroville Dam Spillway' or 'Bumpass Hell'.

[ian]

I'm impressed that an HP printer driver download sums to 0.5 GB and is current 27 minutes into downloading at about 1 byte per week. I'm not actually sure why the Macbook didn't pick it up automatically, in my experience they usually do, but probably because I didn't plug in the USB and am connecting over a network. Yeah, I know it will contain every printer driver HP ever dreamed up along with all the ones they didn't. Oh, look an entire GB of disk space. Now I'll probably have to spend another twenty minutes deleting all the ones I don't need because I own one printer, not all of them.

This process involved moving the Mac Mini from under the stairs and relocating to my office so it's within USB distance of the printer. I used to have a little wireless USB print server dongle but it went odd and after a factory reset refused to configure. Multiplugs where do they go?

On the plus side, I'm getting high on toner fumes. I've not used it for years since I'm resolutely paper-free, but the lady upstairs demands printing facilities.

[Jaded]

I think I read that they have buggered around with how OSX Flying Boat deals with printing drivers and updates. I certainly have defaulted to a generic driver for my Samsung thing. Before that it would revert to outputting anything in code, over hundreds of two line pages, with the proper driver.

[ian]

I was hoping it would offer some kind of app for managing the multitude, but no, it seems that HP decided I wanted every single driver and that's the way it's going to be. I wouldn't mind, but disk space is a bit short on my Macbook. If I recall, MacOS used to come with a bazillion drivers anyway. Just evidently not that one. When I originally set up the printer, I recall that I had to connect via USB and software update did the rest (it probably also downloaded them all).

Oh well, it prints. Next stop make Windows talk to it.

[Kim]

Here at the Apple Support Hotline, printers remain a mystery.  A call comes in from the parental unit:
Is it a printer?  Oh shit.
It's worse than that, it's wireless.  And (naturally) it isn't working.
Are you getting an error message?
Stream of incoherence akin to a marine animal^[1] on amphetamines.
Oh, it's printing now?  What did you do?
Reinstalled the driver.  Of course.  How many instances of that printer are there now, I wonder...

Still, at least it isn't Windows.  Drowned iPhones are less painful; you can just instruct the Boomers to throw money at the problem.


_{[1] Not all screen readers are fish.}

[Kim]

Meanwhile, in unisex spaceadmin land, I've been replacing SSDs.  One of them came down with a case of intermittent ATA errors after the extended power cut on Sunday night.

Half an hour of mucking about to replace the hardware and opportunistic fan-cleaning.  A several of reboots (of the slowest POSTing BIOS in the world) just to prove that the system can boot off both sides of the mirror.  No lossage, because RAID.

I also think the TDM400 card is going senile, in the manner of Spare Head Three.  Had to modprobe the driver twice.  It imagined an incoming call the other week (which may have been an openretch engineer attempting to steal the pair, I suppose).  Barakta answered to be greeted with the usual recording of RevK warning people not to steal the pair.  It's only really there to service barakta's Screenphone^[1] (also on borrowed time), because I've yet to meet an ATA that wasn't crap.  The question is which one goes to silicon heaven first...

And my spidey sense says that Procurve1 has capacitor rot, but in Tommy Flowers tradition, I'll worry about that if we have to switch it off.


_{[1] A phone that goes to 11.  With a PS/2 keyboard port.}

[ian]

To be fair, it worked fine and with minimal pain other than having to download a pile of drivers I don't need. Oh those halcyon days of PostScript and PCL*. Setting up the TP-Link wireless print server was a PITA in comparison, it truly had the most fugly configuration process ever. For some reason wireless print servers seem to have become expensive unobtanium in the meantime – I guess most printers have them built-in. Anyway, it's a good use for the Mac Mini I use as a backup server. I did find an even older Mac Mini in the old computer pile** (the first non-PowerPC version, so probably about 2006) that might have worked, but it was having no-truck with modern wifi (for some reason it insisted on a username for the WPA2 personal). Anyway, it got five minutes of my attention.

I don't imagine it'll work on Windows 10, other than by the lady upstairs emailing me whatever she wants to see printed.


*lie. I used to have manually hack PostScript files. I cried a lot.
**under the world's slowest Asus e-thing and on top of a splendid High Grade ultranotebook that's so ugly it made me buy my first Macbook.

[Kim]

To be fair, I've never actually had a problem printing from a Mac, once furnished with an appropriate driver.  In finest *nix tradition they tend to Just Work.

Until barakta's mum emits bogons at it, that is.

[davelodwig]

The router here at Lodwig towers died last week, it's only a little Mikrotik Hex Lite, and the temperature in the loft never really topped it's limit of 65 degrees but I'm guessing running pretty much at that for the last 3 years took it's toll. Thankfully the new box took less time to get running and setup all the access points through capsman.

New router has arrived a slightly more impressive model, (Hex instead of Hex Lite) and connectors to move the patch panel out of the loft. Just need to find somewhere for it to go in the study, it's not worth racking any of it it's all too compact.

[T42]

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.

[Mr Larrington]

Since replacing the Babbage-Engine in the Great Hall I had a surplus-to-requirements 500 GB SSD.  Bung it in the USB adapter, plug into big bugger in the Estate Office, erase contents, turn into one full-size partition.

Babbage-Engine then takes umbrage.  Connects and disconnects disk every three seconds.  Bad swears ensue.  Plug into different USB port, all well, copy over contents of current internal 110 GB drive.

Roll around on floor opening case, remove 110 GB disk, install 500 GB version, reboot.  Turns out I took the wrong one out.  Arse.  MOAR undignified sub-desk grovelling, finally resulting in two internal 500 GB SSDs and a thick coating of Stuff it pays not to examine closely on my krutty knees.  Just as the Man from DPD arrived to deliver Stuffs.  Oh, the embarrassment…