A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[woollypigs]

Hmm, on the Isle of Lewis for a spot of holidays. Connected to the world via mobile 'tinterweb provided by EE. For some reason the big G thinks I'm Thai and provides results in Thai along with all the menus in Thai. And what's my IP is saying I'm in Wales.

[Pingu]

Yay \o/

I just found 'Decrease space between items (compact view)' in the Win 11 File Explorer Folder Options.

[Ham]

This keyboard name made oi llarf

[Ham]

Does anyone know what I have done with my old SSD and SO-DIMM ? Failing that if anyone has some old stuff to shift I would be happy to make an offer, trying to breathe life into a 5 year old HP laptop that runs much slower than it should (i5, 2600 4 core) which I am blaming on the 4Gb RAM (and spinning rust, obv). The SSD can be fixed for a reasonable £16, but the RAM would be £32 if I put 16Gb in, I really wanted to try the 4Gb I have somewhere <rummages some more> before spending.

[Ham]

Does anyone know what I have done with my old SSD and SO-DIMM ? Failing that if anyone has some old stuff to shift I would be happy to make an offer, trying to breathe life into a 5 year old HP laptop that runs much slower than it should (i5, 2600 4 core) which I am blaming on the 4Gb RAM (and spinning rust, obv). The SSD can be fixed for a reasonable £16, but the RAM would be £32 if I put 16Gb in, I really wanted to try the 4Gb I have somewhere <rummages some more> before spending.

With a moment of genius I realised I did have an 8Gb SoDIMM - inside my work laptop! And yes, it transforms performance, I wonder if I could get away leaving it that way and putting in a helpdesk call on my work laptop?

I also discover (having split it apart) that I have an M2 slot, so even easier to upgrade.

[Mr Larrington]

My Thrustmaster steering wheel stops making 'orrible noises when winding on a lot of left lock once the ambient temperature in the Estate Office exceeds 31 Celsius

[Pingu]

Thrustmaster 

[Kim]

Thrustmaster 

Reputed molishment of teledildonics peripherals input devices for g4m3r d00dz flight-sim affectionados since the 1990s.  They must have branched out into squeaky steering wheels at some point.

[onerousdeporte]

Anyone playing the game stray?

[Tim Hall]

One of my email accounts suddenly wouldn't let me in over the weekend. It's my one I tend to use for "can we take an email address?" when I don't really want to be contacted, online shopping receipts etc.  It's a .freeuk one I had from back in the stone age.

Any hoo, not much meaningful support to fix my particular issue on their website, so I rang them. A single layer of menu options, followed by speaking to a Real Human Being who pretty much fixed the issue in a couple of minutes. Changed the password too. Obvs.

When I got back into the account I saw a support ticket saying they'd suspended the account because of spamming and had my password been compromised, along with a several of bounce messages from emails I'd supposedly sent.

Big up to clara.net (Freeuk parent company) for speedy resolution. (Note to self: Next time heed those warnings saying your password is on a list of compromised ones)

[woollypigs]

I got a raspberry pi, that I got a IRC server (thelounge.chat) and Mastodon running on it. Along with a HDD that I'm doing rsync/ssh backup to. It runs happily along for a random number of days and then ssh just stops responding. I have set up remote.it and when looking at the online log, I see the service is up and down

Jul 12, 2023, 03:13 PM vault went offline
Jul 12, 2023, 03:11 PM vault - VNC went offline
Jul 12, 2023, 03:09 PM vault went online
Jul 12, 2023, 03:08 PM vault - VNC went online
Jul 12, 2023, 03:08 PM vault - RDP went online
Jul 12, 2023, 03:08 PM vault - SSH went online
Jul 12, 2023, 03:03 PM vault - SSH went offline
Jul 12, 2023, 03:02 PM vault - RDP went offline
Jul 12, 2023, 03:02 PM vault - VNC went offline
Jul 12, 2023, 03:01 PM vault went offline
Jul 12, 2023, 02:58 PM vault - VNC went online
Jul 12, 2023, 02:58 PM vault - SSH went online

etc etc

When I do this sudo ssh -vv vault@sserverIP I get this

OpenSSH_9.2p1 Debian-2, OpenSSL 3.0.9 30 May 2023
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 19: include /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d/*.conf matched no files
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 21: Applying options for *
debug2: resolving "serverIP" port 22
debug1: Connecting to serverIP [serverIPinnumbers] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_rsa type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_rsa-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ecdsa type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ecdsa-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ecdsa_sk type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ecdsa_sk-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ed25519 type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ed25519-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ed25519_sk type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_ed25519_sk-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_xmss type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_xmss-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_dsa type -1
debug1: identity file /root/.ssh/id_dsa-cert type -1
debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_9.2p1 Debian-2
debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_8.4p1 Debian-5+deb11u1
debug1: compat_banner: match: OpenSSH_8.4p1 Debian-5+deb11u1 pat OpenSSH* compat 0x04000000
debug2: fd 3 setting O_NONBLOCK
debug1: Authenticating to serverIP:22 as 'vault'
debug1: load_hostkeys: fopen /root/.ssh/known_hosts2: No such file or directory
debug1: load_hostkeys: fopen /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts: No such file or directory
debug1: load_hostkeys: fopen /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts2: No such file or directory
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent

I sometimes get to the enter the magic word part and then it just times out or disconnect

If I ignore the ssh "issue" I got the mastodon running fine for few more  random number of days before the Pi stops responding.

Any pointers ?

[philip]

The final SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT is not an error, it's just the client starting key exchange. You probably need to look at the server logs on the pi to see what is wrong. That could involve attaching a monitor and keyboard to the pi, or perhaps setting LogLevel to DEBUG in sshd_config and ensuring that the logs persist across reboots.

I don't understand the online/offline messages, what produces them? Given that it appears to refer to multiple services it suggests there is nothing wrong with you sshd but the problem is network related. Is this wired, wifi or a mixture? Breaking ssh during key exchange is often associated with a router that doesn't do MTU very well.

[woollypigs]

It managed to get a bit further and even.send the password along and login, but never gave me the prompt


The online/offline message is from a service called http://remote.it A free tunneling service, like hamachi (is/was) it runs in the background and can "jump" some basic firewall settings.

I'm remote so I can't get to the Pi before late August so I can't get to the error logs without SSH or attached a monitor.

[Kim]

On that basis, could this in fact be a tunnelling problem?

[woollypigs]

See that is what I don't know I got no-ip set up on the router and it works just fine. I have forgotten to remove the remote.it service, I used it as temp solution while changing ISP and router.

Right now I'm happily logging in and managed to restart and update the Pi. I've set up a cronjob to restart every day. I know it's not a fix, issue is still there, but I can connect and since it's happy running for 1+X days before playing up, it think this would do until I can sit next to it with a monitor connected.

So questions is which log file to look at and what to look for.

[philip]

So questions is which log file to look at and what to look for.

I think the pi uses systemd as standard. To view the sshd log you do the following as root on the pi:

 edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set LogLevel to DEBUG3
 systemctl restart sshd
 journalctl -r -t sshd

You should see the debug log of any attempt to ssh in.  However I suspect the problem is probably not sshd, but a more general networking problem that sshd happens to trigger, and that when the problem occurs you may simply see some sort of "connection closed" message. I've never had to debug an MTU problem. I suppose you could try reducing the MTU on your client and see if that works.

 

[woollypigs]

Thanks I'll try that

A friend wondered if it was a - "memory leak / over committed forcing swap file and death"

So I'm going to try to set up boot on usb attached ssd - https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb

Never know at least it will speed things up a bit.

[Mr Larrington]

In the red corner: eight video files, with subtitles for the FOREIGN bits, in .mkv format.

In the Fruit corner: iTunes, which doesn’t do .mkv files.

In the middle: Mr Larrington & his Windows PC, failing to convert said files into iTunes format while retaining the subtitles.

Does Thee Panel have any suggestions as to how to make Handbrake do what I want?  Or anything else, if it doesn’t cost money which in my case I have not got?

[chrisbainbridge]

Mr Larrington.  If you are my grandmother in disguise I apologise but does this help? https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/1.3.0/advanced/subtitles.html.

I just looked at an MKV file of mine with subtitles and they are happily burnt in but then they came out of my mixer embedded.  The reference seems to suggest that within handbrake you need to set the subtitles track to burned in.  That sits between audio and chapters in the big central space on my handbrake.

[Mr Larrington]

I thought I'd tried that option but it could be that Handbrake changed Stuffs after I poked “Add All”.  I'll try that with 1 episode & see what happens before running the poor PC flat out all night again.

Edit: further jibbling of options has resulted in preserved subtitles! Hopefully Handbrake hasn’t changed them again before I started doing the remaining seven episodes.

Edit 2: It worked! Ta, Chris

[onerousdeporte]

Any recommendations for a similar thing to H2testw for mac and chromebooks.

Would like to test some usb and only have a mac and a chromebook to use as things to run the program.

[woollypigs]

Yesterday and today was fix all the tech had issues in the home.

Some nutter pulled out in front of us, so we wanted to check the car cam. Noticed it was dead, been offline for a month, after a firmware update and reset, it came back to life.

One down.

Then the Blink "security" cam batteries started to die, after a recharge they couldn't connect to the Blink Servers.

Started to look for what the issue could be online, but only half the sites I normally visit were accessible, rest dead.

Peli also reported that her phone kept dropping from the wifi and many sites couldn't be opened.

Factory reset the router and then Blink servers could be reached and websites loaded and her phone stayed online.

So that was two and three sorted

Now it's the chromecast time to be faffed ...

[Jaded]

Any recommendations for a similar thing to H2testw for mac and chromebooks.

Would like to test some usb and only have a mac and a chromebook to use as things to run the program.

I wonder if Disk Utility will do that for you.

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Bought an Artfone type flip open grannyphone for Mrs Scum. This new one has USB-C and does not sit in a chrging "nest" lik the last one. I have several USB direct cabled power supplies (I like USB-C). Also have some maglock style connectors which Mrs Scum likes.

This phone will not charge using a normal USB-C charger. It will charge using the supplied wall wart plus USB-A to USB-C cable.
I wonder if they have not implemented the USB-C Power Delivery standard and have rather just chosen a pin and connected over 5 Volts

[onerousdeporte]

Any recommendations for a similar thing to H2testw for mac and chromebooks.

Would like to test some usb and only have a mac and a chromebook to use as things to run the program.

I wonder if Disk Utility will do that for you.

I wondered too but have no idea.