Author Topic: Fettled any computer stuff today?  (Read 214245 times)

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #825 on: 29 April, 2017, 08:34:20 am »
Worked out why my downloads have been limping along at half speed since I replaced a motherboard a couple of week ago - it was the f*!$ing Ethernet cable.

I can now use full Virgin 200Mbps bandwidth again :thumbsup:

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #826 on: 29 April, 2017, 09:29:31 pm »
Sitting here trying to decide what flavour of linux I should install on a laptop.  Not a fan of ubuntu so am thinking Debian?

I don't know.  Am undecided...

Gattopardo

  • Lord of the sith
  • Overseaing the building of the death star
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #827 on: 29 April, 2017, 09:50:44 pm »
Right, debian for an I5 processor why can't I just download it.



Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #828 on: 30 April, 2017, 11:16:35 am »
Debian is a good choice, been very pleased with it on my i5 laptop thus far.

It took a bit of buggering about to get the non-free Intel drivers for Ethernet and Wi-Fi to go on with the install, but I managed it in the end - downloading the non-free firmware tarball, unzipping/untarring it and then resturcturing it somehow (memory fails me) before copying it to the USB stick.

There's some info here:
https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware


I've managed to delete a load of stuff I'm never likely to use again from home server's storage and free up almost a terabyte of disk across both mirrors. Ergo, I've been able to consolidate everything into one mirror and remove two old disks. I've also blown away the two mirrors on the backup server and combined them into a RAID6 (RAIDZ2) ZPOOL, which is now big enough to accommodate the backups should the remaining mirror in the home server be filled up.

I was hoping that, by removing two disks and two RAM sticks from the home server, I might notch it's power consumption down by a few Watts. No cigar! The total load on the UPS is still defiantly 62W.

simonp

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #829 on: 03 May, 2017, 08:55:43 pm »
Finished off my rewrite of colleague's code. Just the 1.7x faster while doing more and being less buggy then.

Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #830 on: 04 May, 2017, 02:28:51 pm »
An evening lost re-flashing a Wiley Fox Swift (cheap Android phone... first new phone in many years) to LineageOS (Android 7.x - Nougat).

The phone itself seems good - the only major drawback is that USB chargers (except for the one supplied) fit very loosely in the USB socket.

I've not installed any Google services/apps and thus far, that's generally going well. I'm relying on FDroid as an alternative to Google Play, the F short for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

My only major gripe so far is that installing WhatsApp from the official APK doesn't work. The app itself won't connect properly to the WhatsApp service and whilst the App is installed, the phone becomes very unstable (frequent rebooting). I've wanted to ditch WhatsApp since it became owned by Facebook anyway, but considering how many of my contacts use it I may as well not have the phone.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #831 on: 11 May, 2017, 11:17:34 pm »
I didn't fettle it, I just stroked it.

It is simpler than it looks.

Morat

  • I tried to HTFU but something went ping :(
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #832 on: 13 May, 2017, 10:38:40 am »
Just checking on windows updates. No reason...
<whistles>
Everyone's favourite windbreak

Phil W

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #833 on: 27 May, 2017, 05:20:31 pm »
Setup a personal email server on AWS.

Virtual domains and email addresses plus email aliases (for shopping with)
Certificates auto generated (and renewed) via Letsencrypt certbot-auto
Imap receive and smooth send over TLS connections all in place.
Blocks attempts to use it as mail relay.
SPF record in place, need to add DKIM record
Need to add spam detection into the loop

Google servers are happy sending / receiving email from my mail server, so far so good.

Just got a bit tired of Google reading my emails and then putting bloody adverts up in the browser...

Mr Larrington

  • A bit ov a lyv wyr by slof standirds
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Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #834 on: 27 May, 2017, 05:32:41 pm »
Almost fettled a script to semi-automagically shut down/reboot the WD NAS but still need to figure out how to extract the thing's IP address from the output of $COMMAND and turn it into a variable, on account of it not having a static IP address.
External Transparent Wall Inspection Operative & Mayor of Mortagne-au-Perche
Satisfying the Bloodlust of the Masses in Peacetime

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #835 on: 28 May, 2017, 11:06:12 am »
Almost fettled a script to semi-automagically shut down/reboot the WD NAS but still need to figure out how to extract the thing's IP address from the output of $COMMAND and turn it into a variable, on account of it not having a static IP address.

Alternatively, add a reservation to your (router?) DNS server, capability to do so should be there in the "Advanced" configuration or some such.

Phil W

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #836 on: 28 May, 2017, 01:02:27 pm »
DKIM signing (opendkim) and real time black listing added to personal mail server and all tested. Less painful than I thought it'd be.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #837 on: 28 May, 2017, 02:01:44 pm »

Phil W

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #838 on: 28 May, 2017, 02:13:21 pm »
opendkim

Sounds painful to me.

Nah. Install open dkim.  Create folders for the email domains you are running. Set permissions. Generate the dkim signing keys in your domain folders. update the main postfix config and open dkim config files. Add dkim TXT record to your DNS records. Start open dkim and restart postfix. Run external tests. All in about an hour to setup and test.

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #839 on: 29 May, 2017, 09:47:52 am »
If you're called Kim and you're getting opend it would be extremely painful.

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #840 on: 29 May, 2017, 01:01:48 pm »
Preemptively fettling the JYE Tech DSO I've ordered from BangGood, and looking at the schematic, the Trigger seems to go into the digital circuitry board distinct from the single channel input on the STM32F103C8 CPU.  It looks like a PWM output from PB8 is being used with a comparator, and then fed into PA1 (vs PA0 for the signal input).  I'm guessing PA1 is just configured as a digital input (or possibly an interrupt, but I haven't checked whether that's possible on the CPU datasheet).

I imagine that means that it could fairly easily be reconfigured to use an external trigger.  Amusingly, the cheapest and easiest way to acquire a second analogue board, may be to buy another DSO, and canabalise that.  ;D

Since there's also a second ADC, which I'm assuming is unused, a second channel could possibly be added too, but that may require repurposing of an IO line, and rewriting of the software.  JYE Tech have said that they intend to release the source code, but I can't find it anywhere, yet.
Actually, it is rocket science.
 

Phil W

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #841 on: 29 May, 2017, 05:58:20 pm »
If you're called Kim and you're getting opend it would be extremely painful.

ahh, missed that, he he

vorsprung

  • Opposites Attract
    • Audaxing
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #842 on: 29 May, 2017, 09:31:41 pm »
Setup a personal email server on AWS.

Virtual domains and email addresses plus email aliases (for shopping with)
Certificates auto generated (and renewed) via Letsencrypt certbot-auto
Imap receive and smooth send over TLS connections all in place.
Blocks attempts to use it as mail relay.
SPF record in place, need to add DKIM record
Need to add spam detection into the loop

Google servers are happy sending / receiving email from my mail server, so far so good.

Just got a bit tired of Google reading my emails and then putting bloody adverts up in the browser...

I got bored of running my own email server a few years ago and switched to googlemail

Phil W

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #843 on: 30 May, 2017, 11:28:41 am »
I got bored of running my own email server a few years ago and switched to googlemail

I've got bored of Google reading my email then pushing adverts in my face left right and centre.

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #844 on: 30 May, 2017, 12:35:46 pm »
I got bored of running my own email server a few years ago and switched to googlemail

I've got bored of Google reading my email then pushing adverts in my face left right and centre.

Google will still be reading a fair proportion of your email courtesy of the other end of the conversation but, yes, fewer adverts if you run your own.

I need to do something about my spam problem, it went from 5 spams a day to ~400 a day about 12 months ago (on an email address I've never attempted to hide that's almost 20 years old now). I really need to get my hosting provider to move it to IMAP and then use a script running on a machine at home to filter the spam to a separate folder (whitelisting, blacklisting, heuristics), also want to do some other filtering too.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #845 on: 30 May, 2017, 01:05:59 pm »
I got bored of running my own email server a few years ago and switched to googlemail

I've got bored of Google reading my email then pushing adverts in my face left right and centre.

Google will still be reading a fair proportion of your email courtesy of the other end of the conversation but, yes, fewer adverts if you run your own.

I need to do something about my spam problem, it went from 5 spams a day to ~400 a day about 12 months ago (on an email address I've never attempted to hide that's almost 20 years old now). I really need to get my hosting provider to move it to IMAP and then use a script running on a machine at home to filter the spam to a separate folder (whitelisting, blacklisting, heuristics), also want to do some other filtering too.

real time block lists are your friend.
Postfix can do whitelisting/blacklisting.
That and something like spamd for the heuristics stuff.

Excerpt from my main.cf

Code: [Select]
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
        permit_mynetworks,
        permit_sasl_authenticated,
        reject_unauth_destination
        reject_unauth_pipelining,
check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/client_access,
        check_sender_access hash:/etc/postfix/sender_access,
reject_unknown_client,
        reject_invalid_helo_hostname,
        reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname,
        reject_non_fqdn_sender,
        reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
        reject_unknown_sender_domain,
        reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
        reject_invalid_hostname,
reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org,
        reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,
        reject_rbl_client b.barracudacentral.org,
        reject_rbl_client dnsbl.sorbs.net,
        check_policy_service unix:private/policy,
        permit

The only problem with the RBLs are the legitimate senders that wind up on them, including yahoo (btinternet) and aol mail servers  :facepalm:

So I've got 'notify_classes = bounce, 2bounce, delay, policy, resource, software' within my postfix config and that generates a postmaster email each time an email is bounced and I go through all the bounces every few days. It's a PITA.

However, I'm also runing fail2ban and I have it monitoring my mail log - so this block spammers after three attempts who continually try spamming mail recipients.

That said, for or the hassle it causes me, being able to create a new virtual_aliases for every company I entrust an email address to adds a level of granularity to automatic mail filtering and also a level of security so I know where my details of been breached or illegally passed on etc.

Phil W

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #846 on: 30 May, 2017, 01:12:19 pm »
Yep I've added RBL and have a few aliases setup for online shopping etc.

Afasoas

Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #847 on: 30 May, 2017, 01:14:54 pm »
During the heatwave last week the home server got a bit warm. Fan speeds were unchanged. So I installed and configured fancontrol and hey presto - MB temps and CPU temps have been a practically constant 30 °C. That's the good news, at least.

The bad news is that the iKVM/out of band management on the motherboard spams me every few seconds to tell me low fan speed warning has been asserted/de-asserted. And then my mail server spams me every minute to tell me the mail delivery threshold warning has been exceeded.  :facepalm:

I've not yet worked out how to shut the iKVM up without disabling all of the alerts.

Feanor

  • It's mostly downhill from here.
Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #848 on: 02 June, 2017, 01:35:30 pm »
Bear of a morning here at Feanor Towers.
Multiple hardware failures, and me making an arse of things making it worse...

I was in Romania last week, and lost contact with my servers back home.
Call home, and yes, the Internet went down overnight and didn't come back.
Guided them through some basic diagnostics, and we have no blinkenlights on the Firebrick firewall appliance.
Looks like a failed PSU ( internal ).
It's done that before.
Ordered replacement PSU to arrive yesterday just as I get home.

Hmm, it's not the PSU.
There's perfectly good 5v going to the main board. Main board has further on-board regulators and the test points show a lack of 3.3v.
Call to AAISP, and they agree to send me a loaner whilst I send back the failed unit.

In the meantime, I cobble together an alternative firewall out of chewing gum and Intel network cards to get the rest of the family off my case.

So today, replacement FB arrives, and I go to restore my saved config onto it.
But my last saved config was a bit old, and there had been changes since then.
So I'd manually edited the XML config file to current spec before restoring it.
All is well, and Internet Connectivity is restored.

Then the IP phone rang.
From extension 1002.
I don't have an extension 1002.
The call did not come in over the landline, it came in over IP.
But it hadn't come in to the Asterisk box over any of the IAX trunks I have from other family member's Asterisk boxes,
nor had it come in over the landline ( the landline phone did not ring ).  So how had the call come in to the Asterisk box?
I don't allow unsolicited SIP inbound through the firewall (Because people try to rape your Asterisk box for free phone calls onto the PSTN).

Dawning realisation...The firewall is not firewalling.
Pull the Internet connection straight away.
Check the config: I've messed it up manually editing, and got the default no-match to ALLOW not REJECT!!!
Fix this in short order.

But in the meantime, my 2 Win Server 2008R2 boxen have been compromised, and were hammering the Internet themselves.
I've just finished restoring them from backups.

And mid-way through fixing them, I lost the Remote Desktop Connection to both of them.
This time, it was a gigabit switch that decided to give up.
All port lights jammed on solid, no blinken like normal.
Replaced the switch and finally got the servers back up, and we're done.

I'm going to have a glass of grog with my lunch now!



Mr Larrington

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Re: Fettled any computer stuff today?
« Reply #849 on: 02 June, 2017, 04:34:23 pm »
Restored Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.)'s crappy no-name Android tablet to something resembling working order.
External Transparent Wall Inspection Operative & Mayor of Mortagne-au-Perche
Satisfying the Bloodlust of the Masses in Peacetime