The computing stuff rant thread

[Kim]

The duplexer on our long-suffering LaserJet 4050 appears to have droid rot.  Chronic paper jams, not resolved by tightening the springamathings that tension the reversible clutch wotsits on either side of the roll-thinger, which is the standard fix for this problem.  Furthermore, blasting the fluff out of assorted optical sensors and cleaning the rollers had no effect.  By which point a small rainforest had been sent to the fail-pile, and several pieces of Computer Beige™ plastic, of varying levels of importance, had snapped - presumably on account of being from 1996^[1]. 

I've decided that discretion is the better part of valour, and we'll just go without a duplexer and try not to snap anything else, for that would mean <fx: thunderclap> having to buy a new printer.  Which would result in a great many bad swears.


_{[1] I know how that feels, tbh.}

[Feanor]

My 4050 is in a similar state.
It paper-jams quite a lot, and also the print density is poor: the blacks are a rather dull grey. Even with a new toner cartridge.

I need to either google for how to fix it, or let it pass into the next life.
But what to replace it with?

[Kim]

Exactly.  Barakta suggests that Brother is probably the least-worst printer molishment since HP turned evil.  But what are the chances of finding a workhorse laser that speaks Postscript over Ethernet without any Devil's Radio or cloudy shenanigans, and that is likely to last a couple of decades?

[CarlF]

https://www.kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.uk/en/products/printers/ECOSYSP5026CDW.html

We picked up one of these a couple of years ago for Mrs F's business and it's still seeming like it was a good choice.  Reassuringly solid in a manner that's reminiscent of Laserjets of yore. Seems to support the sorts of standards a proper printer should (barring a parallel interface of course). Came with an actual paper manual, even.

Not particularly cheap, but not overpriced for how solid it is.

Canon and Xerox also still appear to make proper printers with models at that sort of level too.

[Afasoas]

Exactly.  Barakta suggests that Brother is probably the least-worst printer molishment since HP turned evil.  But what are the chances of finding a workhorse laser that speaks Postscript over Ethernet without any Devil's Radio or cloudy shenanigans, and that is likely to last a couple of decades?

FWIW I'm sitting next to an HL-L2370N which sadly does not speak PostScript. But does do PCL (over Ethernet) and appears to just work^TM with Linux.
It's not been the source of too much pain with Windows either.

[grams]

Thanks to the fruit company wanting printing to be a thing on iPhones without wanting printer drivers to be a thing on iPhones, almost all vaguely recent networkable printers support AirPrint, which means they support IPP for sending print jobs, and most will accept a PDF, which means you can print to them from basically anything without any proprietary drivers or cloud bollocks.

[Kim]

Thanks to the fruit company wanting printing to be a thing on iPhones without wanting printer drivers to be a thing on iPhones, almost all vaguely recent networkable printers support AirPrint, which means they support IPP for sending print jobs, and most will accept a PDF, which means you can print to them from basically anything without any proprietary drivers or cloud bollocks.

That's disturbingly sensible.  The Mega-Global Fruit Corporation have their moments...

[Mr Larrington]

Exactly.  Barakta suggests that Brother is probably the least-worst printer molishment since HP turned evil.  But what are the chances of finding a workhorse laser that speaks Postscript over Ethernet without any Devil's Radio or cloudy shenanigans, and that is likely to last a couple of decades?

My Brother does something called “BR-Script3” which is, it sez 'ere, “the Brother version of Postscript”.  No doubt it differs from real Postscript in many small but exciting ways.  Does Ethernet as well as Stan's Radio.

[Afasoas]

Thanks to the fruit company wanting printing to be a thing on iPhones without wanting printer drivers to be a thing on iPhones, almost all vaguely recent networkable printers support AirPrint, which means they support IPP for sending print jobs, and most will accept a PDF, which means you can print to them from basically anything without any proprietary drivers or cloud bollocks.

That's disturbingly sensible.  The Mega-Global Fruit Corporation have their moments...

Microsoft are also heading in this general direction.
Which would I'd welcome with open arms given the print servers and fleet of aging printers that I appear to have become saddled with*.

Knowing Microsoft, they will find some way to make it unworkable.

_{*Not what I signed up for, but give the £coin they insist on paying me I'm not going to complain too much}

[Afasoas]

Microsoft Word.

It's about to turn 40. And it's still sh!te.
Each document is handled as a separate window but dialog boxes as still model across all of them.

The UI is still pants too. It took at least two minutes to work out how to insert a date field. A menu bar with drop down menus for seldom used features makes more sense then icons that open said modal dialog boxes.

LibreOffice Writer FTW.

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia!

What’s with iCloud continually popping up a stupid window telling me nothing interesting or useful and requiring me to click “Close”, that I might be rid of it?  Just run it in the background, unseen and silent, like it used to.  You bunch of stunned musk-oxen.

Kthxbai

[Beardy]

A curse on micro$oft and a pox on anyone who ever thought that the subscription model was a bit of a wheeze. Bastards one and all!

Dr Beardy is still writing academic tomes with a former colleague and thus still needs to use M$ products. Of course they have moved Office over to the subscription model with O365 a while ago now, but it seems that some wag in the M$ marketing office has decided to force the holdouts on old versions of paid for Office to migrate to newer subscribed versions by withholding security updates. Our aging Mac desktop is now choking on the installed version of PowerPoint and thus we are expected to fork out money for a subscription.  Bastards. 

ETA

And while I'm ranting about M$, isn't it time the sorted out their install application countdown script. Its been in use for umpteen billionely years and it STILL lies about how long the install is going to take.It's told me 'about 4 minutes for the last thirty or so minutes. 

[Kim]

In a quest to repay some of the technical debt I've been accumulating since I got distracted by the intricacies of counting funny-shaped bikes riding in circles, I've spent most of the afternoon failing to upgrade PFSense to 2.7.0.

It all went a bit xkcd://349 and right now I'm considering myself lucky that - thanks to a combination of ZFS and luck - I'm back on 2.6.0 with functional LAN routing and both an IPv4 *and* an IPv6 address on the primary WAN interface at the same time.  And all the old bugs.

I've come to the conclusion that PFSense is just really bad when PPPoE is involved, and Netgate don't seem inclined towards fixing it.

Not sure whether OPNSense is any better, or whether I should throw money at the problem with MicroTik or something.  Back in the day, I had a usefully modified m0n0wall, but I've decided that I'm now too old for knitting my own routers from shell scripts.

There must be something that Just Works and can cope with IPv6, a couple of WAN interfaces and an assortment of local VLANs with various firewalls between them.

[Peter]

That all seems pretty straightforward, Kim, so I'll leave you to it.

Here's another couple of geniuses at work:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctM_Rvgjfpo

[Mr Larrington]

O hai Malwarebytes!

I know you want me to “upgrade” to your “premium”product by giving you money, but your constant pop-ups are likely to have the opposite fucking effect, viz. cause me consign your not-premium product to the compost heap of history next to Bakelite, foot-operated windscreen washers and Michael X.

Kthxbai

[Feanor]

I've decided that I'm now too old for knitting my own routers from shell scripts.

There must be something that Just Works and can cope with IPv6, a couple of WAN interfaces and an assortment of local VLANs with various firewalls between them.

I got to that point a Several of years ago.

So I just Paid The Man (Rev RAK) for a Firebrick, and let it get on with it.
It's a small single-box thing, and really very configurable.

And I just accept that I may need to adjust my requirements to suit, if I can't configure it exactly how I want.
I've not had to do that, and I've got a fairly non-domestic configuration here.
(And I'm tunnelling my AAISP IP addresses over Starlink for added fun, using AAISP's L2TP facility.
Yay! I pay for 2 ISPs.)

Also it consumes much less power than the small PC stuffed with NICs that it replaced.

Regarding the MicroTik kit, on the AAISP IRC channel, you will often pick up some noise about people knitting their own using the MicroTik routerboard devices, but I've never explored that. I'm at the CBA stage with that.

[Kim]

Yes, the thought did occur to me that while Firebricks aren't guaranteed to be bug-free, in the event of finding a bug you can just whinge about it on IRC and RevK will get it sorted.

They also don't treat IPv6 as something optional that should be disabled at the first sign of problems.

(Current pfsense is running on one of those APU2 boards, so is silent and reasonably energy-efficient.)


My setup may be more complicated than the usual domestic WiFi-in-a-box, but it's hardly unusual by the standards of small businesses.  I expect that after the obligatory weekend of mucking about, a Firebrick would Just Work.

[barakta]

I am all for a Firebrick given how miserable things are; I suspect this is what we will end up doing at some point.

[Mr Larrington]

Luser, if it specifically says in the readme file “Mod X will not work unless you have mod Y installed” and mod Y is something which in your case you have not got then it’s no wonder your log file gets filled up with error messages pertaining to mod X.  Also try starting the game with -unlimitedlog so it doesn’t stop writing to the log file after some ludicrously low size limit is reached.  That way I might stand a fighting chance of determining whether your game crashes are due to my mods or some of the other Horble Stuffs you’ve installed.

At least when lusers were doing this ten years ago I was getting paid to rant at them

[Maverick]

My setup may be more complicated than the usual domestic WiFi-in-a-box, but it's hardly unusual by the standards of small businesses.  I expect that after the obligatory weekend of mucking about, a Firebrick would Just Work.

+1 for the Firebrick, my current 2700 has been sat in the corner doing it's thing unobtrusively for the past 12 years after Feanor lent me a 105. I keep thinking I'll upgrade but there seems little reason. The software has been regularly updated (and improved) and is so reliable that I let A&A do the updates remotely.
On the other hand I'm in the middle of upgrading the network here which has been a mini nightmare due to modern house construction forcing me to route the cabling down the outside of the house to provide a cabled connection to my AV system.

[Afasoas]

In a quest to repay some of the technical debt I've been accumulating since I got distracted by the intricacies of counting funny-shaped bikes riding in circles, I've spent most of the afternoon failing to upgrade PFSense to 2.7.0.

It all went a bit xkcd://349 and right now I'm considering myself lucky that - thanks to a combination of ZFS and luck - I'm back on 2.6.0 with functional LAN routing and both an IPv4 *and* an IPv6 address on the primary WAN interface at the same time.  And all the old bugs.

I've come to the conclusion that PFSense is just really bad when PPPoE is involved, and Netgate don't seem inclined towards fixing it.

I had a dalliance with OPNsense and it didn't end well. UI lacking helpfulness and validation. I recall raising an issue about it and the devs brushing it off. So I've stuck with pfSense, despite Netgate qualms.
Still running 2.5.2 here; I was waiting for 2.6.1 before upgrading and I see that 2.7.0 is available - so I will upgrade to that during my next free weekend. What is the issue with PPPoE?

[Kim]

What is the issue with PPPoE?

Best summed up as a lack of testing, I think.

In 2.6.0 there's a mildly annoying bug where throughput is counted twice.  And if you have IPv6 configured by dhcp6 or SLAAC on more than one interface (which doesn't have to be PPPoE) the multiple instances of dhcp6cd try to bind to the same interface, which doesn't work so well.

In 2.7.0 they appear to have configured dhcp6cd more correctly, but I'm seeing a mystery bug where the WAN interface loses its IPv4 address after a couple of seconds (if configured for *only* IPv4, it works fine).  I thought this was cruft in my config file, so spent Sunday configuring a clean install of 2.7.0 from scratch.  This worked until it suddenly didn't, with no obvious clues in the log and disabling bits of unrelated configuration (eg. static routes, the DNS resolver) would restore functionality.  I concluded that there's probably something subtle and timing-related going on with the various scripts that run when an IP address changes, but by this point I was tired and fed up and generally lacking enthusiasm to debug it.

(Also, searching the internet for answers with broken IPv4 is a special form of frustration.)


I'm assuming that Firebricks can tell whether a PPPoE interface is up using LCP, rather than the bodge of ICMP pinging something at the other end that pfSense et al use.  That would seem to offer substantial advantages in terms of implementing failover that actually works.

[Afasoas]

What is the issue with PPPoE?

Best summed up as a lack of testing, I think.

In 2.6.0 there's a mildly annoying bug where throughput is counted twice.  And if you have IPv6 configured by dhcp6 or SLAAC on more than one interface (which doesn't have to be PPPoE) the multiple instances of dhcp6cd try to bind to the same interface, which doesn't work so well.

In 2.7.0 they appear to have configured dhcp6cd more correctly, but I'm seeing a mystery bug where the WAN interface loses its IPv4 address after a couple of seconds.  I thought this was cruft in my config file, so spent Sunday configuring a clean install of 2.7.0 from scratch.  This worked until it suddenly didn't, with no obvious clues in the log and disabling bits of unrelated configuration (eg. static routes, the DNS resolver) would restore functionality.  I concluded that there's probably something subtle and timing-related going on with the various scripts that run when an IP address changes, but by this point I was tired and fed up and generally lacking enthusiasm to debug it.

(Also, searching the internet for answers with broken IPv4 is a special form of frustration.)

Ugh. That sounds most frustrating. For as long as I've been using pfSense there's been an array of interesting problems with each .0 release, which is why I've habitually avoided them.

There's not too much IPv6 here. I've experimented with it at various times - each WAN interface has a HE IPv6 GRE tunnel as I don't think either of my ISPs have IPv6 on general availability. There's one vLAN with SLAAC enabled. Another has some static IPv6 configured but I wound up disabling SLAAC after it borked Android devices.

I've also notice Debian Bookworm was released earlier in the year and I still have hosts running Buster. It's about time I started doing some testing with my Ansible configurations and working out what needs to change.

[Kim]

AAISP customer, so IPv6 is normal and ordinary and has been working fine here for years.  As such I get a bit resentful when people's default solution to network probems is "disable IPv6".

I do have a special IPv4-only VLAN/SSID for whichever buggy old Android we had that couldn't cope with RAs (the more recent ones are fine), which also has 802.11b enabled for testing.



I upgraded our desktops from bullseye to bookworm last week.  No drama at all for barakta's.  Mine got some mild font-rendering shenanigans, and I had to re-write my script that toggles between monitor speakers and headphones, because the sound system has been completely replaced.  Again.

[Beardy]

Compared to the above knitting, my rant is more of a playground whinge.

Someone has been ducking g about with the made of iPhone devils radio stack, either the Cuptino crew or the Oticon lot. My Shiny New hearing aids have made for iPhone devils radio functionality, and up to last week they fairly happily swapped between my phone and fondleslab for audio streaming g with little drama. Occasionally they needed a ‘power recycle’ to facilitate the nice playing, but mostly they worked. This week they are very reluctant to auto switch and need all sorts of fiddling. Bastards.