The computing stuff rant thread

[Mr Larrington]

Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off   This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS

All downloads take 3 minutes 20 seconds?

All downloads grind along at 3 kb/s for a while and then fall over, more like

[hulver]

Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off   This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS

We had that problem at work. 5 different downloads of Windows 10 Anniversary update did bog down our (fairly poor at the best of times) connection a bit.

[Kim]

We had that problem at work. 5 different downloads of Windows 10 Anniversary update did bog down our (fairly poor at the best of times) connection a bit.

Around the turn of the century, this sort of thing could be mitigated by cunning application of squid^[1] on the local network.

Sadly, the rise of indiscriminate use of https (which has its advantages) and streaming means that less and less web content is cacheable.  These days I'm seeing a byte hit rate of about 10% (mostly static images and packages downloaded by apt).  I think it'll still work for Windows Update (hard to tell when you don't have multiple boxen running the same version of Windows), but needs careful tweaking to optimise performance.


_{[1] Other caching proxies are available.}

[Feanor]

In Win 10, on the update settings page there's an option to accept updates from other computers on your LAN or the Internet.

I think this makes windows update work a bit like a peer-to-peer filesharing network.

Never tried it.

First google hit on the topic:
http://www.howtogeek.com/224981/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-uploading-updates-to-other-pcs-over-the-internet/

[Mr Larrington]

I've got that P2P thing set up on all the PCs at Larrington Towers but in spite of being connected to one another via gigabit switches and Cat6 String the updates to Bruiser McHuge (the big job upstairs that had benn switched off for five weeks) crippled the internets utterly to DETH.  The download of an updated driver for the graphics card threw up its hands in surrender while the New! IMPROVED!! Version of Nvidia Geforce Experience went spooey halfwat through installing itself and couldn't be arsed to put the old version back and when I finally did manage to install it, it had blanked its little branes of my username/passworm combo so I had to ask Nvidia for a new one which they still haven't sent me forcing me to set up an entirely new identity as "Munty Cakes" and proving that dickish Babbage-Behaviours is not the sole province of Microsith

And breathe...

[Afasoas]

Will whatever it is that's nomming all my internets bandwidth either make itself known or fuck the fuck off   This is as bad as the Battle Mountain Super 8, FFS

We had that problem at work. 5 different downloads of Windows 10 Anniversary update did bog down our (fairly poor at the best of times) connection a bit.

Running WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) would download the updates from Microsoft (during the night) and then cache them on your local network so this sort of thing doesn't happen.
But you need an Active Directory domain and stuff which is probably OTT for 4/5 PCs

[pcolbeck]

Windows 10 Anniversary upgrade. FFS this is ridiculous MS did you not test this before releasing it into the wild !!!!

[Mr Larrington]

It actually installed first time on Bruiser McHuge, and seems mostly well-behaved apart from eating the screen saver settings, making you log into OneDrive, throwing Cortina in your face and reinstating all the useless "Apps" which you painstakingly threw away when Win 10 was first installed.  Also I can't find the option to configure which software is allowed to put icons in the system tray, which is pants.

I suppose I should switch on the last remaining not-upgraded machine in Larrington Towers and see whether planet Earth runs out of electricity before Spencer the Halfwit can finish updating.

[barakta]

I really hate tech support iOS devices as I don't USE or own any myself so I'm entirely at what I can Google or work out and I consider them to be utterly unintuitively maddeningly shit. My Mum however LOVES her iOS devices.

Apple's mail app is buggy as fuck with Plusnet emails.

The app I sorted has just suddenly emailed to say "Oh Hai, we can't afford to be a free app anymore" which is fair enough, but what isn't fair is the 4 days notice they gave for turning off the product which I can't find clearly stated anywhere (could be my bad parse of English but even so) and doesn't give me time to find alternatives which is probably their intent, but I think is shitty and sneaky.  I was in the middle of time critical complicated life shit this week so simply could not support it.

I would say "just pay, $50 a year isn't much" but actually I won't reward shitty sneaky behaviour like that so I've said sign up for trial to reboot email and I'll kill it all when I see her in ~11 days... See if the Apple app is any less shite, or boot her over to Gmail once and for all...

Hate parental tech support. Hate iOS even more.

[Mr Larrington]

Someone - and I suspect it's Microsith installing updates on Logitech's behalf - has b0rked the driver for my steering wheel.  Again.  Just fucking stop it.  And no, Logitech, downloading and installing the latest version from your webshite does not fix it, no, you have to go back to the five year old version you squirrelled away when you bought the thing.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

After eight years, and behaving unreliably for a couple of weeks, my mp3 player has finally given up the ghost.  RIP Creative Zen. And Creative have stopped making mp3 players. 

[Kim]

Fairly predictably, the MP3 player market has polarised into  a) cheap shit  and  b) audiophile bling, on the basis that the overwhelming majority of the market will just  c) use their smartphone.  As such, it seems to be a case of "just works, large storage capacity, doesn't require iTunes - pick any two".


TBH, and this probably marks me as old, I feel vaguely silly plugging my over-the-ear headphones into anything smaller than a smartphone, even though my Sansa Clip is actually better at the job.

[Afasoas]

What magic incantations do I need to whisper softly at the alter of thine email gods in order to stop Google, Apple and Microsoft from either silently blocking or spamming emails sent from my mail server?

It's not on any lists (IP and domains)
SPF/DKIM/DMARC are all set-up and verified (except for Microsoft because something caching whotsit their mail implementation seems to be permanently broken)
It's using opportunistic TLS with correctly set-up certificates (intermediates/root) from an actual CA

I think I've exhausted all options now.
I swear it's just a ploy to make you pay monies for EvilCorp mail hosting.

[Greenbank]

https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/

I found that the IP address for one server we were renting had been previously used for dodgy stuff, so the reputation was awful.

No way to fix it except for paying monies to EvilCorp so we ended up using mailchimp (our volume was low enough that we were in the free tier).

I'm weighing up a similar problem for my own stuff. Do I continue to pay for my web/email hosting (but no ssh access) or do I use that money to get a small VPS and run my own stuff (postfix/dovecot/nginx/etc)? The danger is I get an IP that's got a bad history and I end up having to spend more money to get my outgoing mail sent.

[Chris S]

Sigh. Repeat after me, Mr Smith: "I must always turn off Automatic Updates when preparing Virtual Machines for test labs."

In fact, write it out 100 times - you've got time after all - while all these VMs are fucking updating  .

[Kim]

Sadly the evil empires seem strangely sluggish to set up IPv6 MXes, even when they've doing IPv6 for other things, which might otherwise allow you to sidestep the tainted IP problem...

For my own email, I just forward to my ISP's relay and let them deal with reputation problems as they come up.

[Chris S]

Oh look - Microsoft updated the UI for Windows 10. That's fucked up my automation nicely. Cheers for that  .

[Mr Larrington]

Apparently the little wossname you can select on a Windows shortcut to "Run [Minimised|Normal|Maximised]" doesn't actually do what it says on the tin but instead remembers the state the thing was in when closed and starts in that state next time round.

There is, however, one fundamental problem with this conjecture, viz. it is 100% Pure Unadulterated Lie.  Surely, Microsith, this is not beyond your ken to sort out?  Or is it that you're too busy trying to make us Do Stuffs the Redmond Way actually to make your software work as advertised?

[pcolbeck]

Cisco on the whole NX-OS is  avast improvement on IOS but sometimes the lack of clear documentation drives me mad.
Perfectly good route redistribution into OSPF with route tagging for connected routes setup on old IOS based switches but will it work on the new NX-OS Nexus switches, will it hell. Spent two hours last night in a datacentre at Mediacity trying every incantation I could think of before I happened on the right one to make it work. You missed a vital bit of information out of all the examples and documents you have published!
Good job the customer was understanding and flexible with extending the allocated downtime and pleased that the new Nexus switches made his Citrix and VMware farms run like shit of a shovel.

[Afasoas]

I found that the IP address for one server we were renting had been previously used for dodgy stuff, so the reputation was awful.

<snip>

I'm weighing up a similar problem for my own stuff. Do I continue to pay for my web/email hosting (but no ssh access) or do I use that money to get a small VPS and run my own stuff (postfix/dovecot/nginx/etc)? The danger is I get an IP that's got a bad history and I end up having to spend more money to get my outgoing mail sent.

I created an account with ReturnPath only to find that my mail servers sender reputation is neutral as there's insufficient data collated for it's IP address.

On Edit: Email sent using Evolution get spammed. Email sent using Roundcube (which is hosted on the mail server) do not. I need to re-test and ensure this is a consistent scenario and then investigate it further. There's no obvious difference in the headers.

On Further Edit: Emails sent via IPv6 are getting spammed, IPv4 is fine. Both v6 and v4 IP addresses have PTR records, included in SPF and have the same repulation/not black listed etc. T'is a curious thing thobut.

[Mr Larrington]

I switched on Spencer The Halfwit - the aged laptop in the Grand Bedchamber - for the first time in eight months yesterday.  Spent a long time getting rid of unwanted "apps" that Microsith seems to think no-one can live without.  Finally he wanted to apply eight months of updates which, remarkably, worked without a hitch.

Except that all the unwanted "apps" were back.  Note to Microsith: I do not own an Xbox.  Just fuck off, and when you've finished doing that, fuck off some more.

[barakta]

Fucking windows and your fucking updates.

Last week updates trashed GRUB (bootloader) and UEFI (bios jibbler) and the Windows install and took the entire system down with it. Had to disconnect the Linux disk and have time wasted by M$'s diagnostics failing to deal with the issue. Safemode seemed to work and reverted the update. Kim then spent ages fixing UEFI and GRUB for me so my Linux could load properly.

Today I am trying to do something time critical, it won't work in Linux so have to try Windows.

"Your system will reboot in 15 mins, you can't stop me nah nah nah"

The only way to disable this bullshit is to muck around in registry risking killing things or apply this update then dis-able updates entirely which is my next plan.

Having just rebooted it to get on with my task, I've now spent the last 45 minutes waiting for it to jibble those updates... A total waste of my time and it didn't even have the courtesy to say "Oh yeah, we'll take your PC offline for nearly an hour".  It had several reboots which needed babysitting to get it back into Windows cos thankfully it has not killed GRUB this time and Linux autoloads.

NOW I am going to disable updates so the system cannot do this to me again. I shall also have to turn off the anti-privacy settings which have reverted despite my OFFing them several times!

FUCK YOU MICRO$HIT

[barakta]

Then it went to a usual login window...

"Hi"  . o O ( Don't you hi me you piece of shit )

"We've updated your PC" . o O ( Don't I fucking know it, you timewasting piece of shit )

"Preparing updates" . o O ( Now I have to twiddle my thumbs some more, fuck you! )

"Let's start!" . o O ( Start what? A fight? )

System appears to be visually different, it's reverted back to evil start menu and ignored all my settings. There does not seem to be any way to disable automatic updates. Google time, and if needed I will do a registry hack as this cannot be trusted.

[Kim]

Last week updates trashed GRUB (bootloader) and UEFI (bios jibbler) and the Windows install and took the entire system down with it. Had to disconnect the Linux disk and have time wasted by M$'s diagnostics failing to deal with the issue. Safemode seemed to work and reverted the update. Kim then spent ages fixing UEFI and GRUB for me so my Linux could load properly.

Point of order:  Something corrupted the BIOS, which automagically restored itself from backup and reverted to default settings.  The default settings allowed Windows to start, but on seeing it had lost its EFI magic, it then run amok on the bootloaders and rendered Linux unbootable, before discovering that some updates thing had b0rked the system so it would only start in safe mode.

Unless handled with tranquillity, dual-booting with Windows can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death.  Fortunately, I was wise to this one from last time, and managed to sort it out quickly without re-installing anything.

http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/ is handy for jump-starting OSes with broken bootloaders.

[ian]

Fucking overly complex software licensing. No mothership, I don't fucking know if I want Creative Cloud Enterprise Design, Creative Cloud Enterprise Design Web Premium, Creative Cloud Production Premium, or Creative Cloud Enterprise Complete.

Any clues on the Adobe site? Nope. I just want the one with Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Is it too much to ask? Evidently.

Grumble. (OK, I can probably guess the first, but a nice comparison site without having to dig through a PDF would have been nice.) Now to do battle with the mothership's IT ordering system. Bah, I want my mum.