Author: davidg

iPhone fails at phone calls too much

Around April 1st, T-Mobile and Sprint called the merger done. Also around that time, there was an iPhone update. Since then, my iPhone has a bad time receiving phone calls. Not always, but way more than ought to happen.

I think I’ve seen this four times since the beginning of April. The symptoms are that the iPhone rings, to let me know of an incoming call. I see that it is someone I want to talk with, so I hit the button to accept the call. The call stalls in the not-quite-complete starting phase. One time, I could hear a friend on the other end, saying hello and could I hear him.

The iPhone is just completely stuck. The call cannot be ended. The call cannot be removed from the active list by swiping upward. The only thing I can do, is to power down the phone.

I paid way too much money for this telephone to fail at phone calls.

I’d like to also mention that before that (not much before – maybe a month or two), and still today, sometimes iMessage loses it’s brains too. The symptoms are very similar: non-responsive, and closing does nothing. For iMessage, I have to go into airplane mode, then power down, then power up, and then get out airplane mode. Finally, iMessage recognizes that it didn’t actually have a connection before, so it tries again and this time doesn’t fail.

For as much as this device cost, I expect better. If I wanted a bad device, I could have gone with four different bad devices for the price of this one.

The Helm email server – now blocked by Microsoft

This is an automated email from your Helm Server.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For information about why this might happen visit our support
article here: 
https://support.thehelm.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024507754
                  Helm 

<tccof@hotmail.com>: host hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104.47.9.33]
    said: 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [35.162.166.161] weren't sent.
    Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network
    is on our block list (S3140). You can also refer your provider to
    http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
    [VE1EUR03FT024.eop-EUR03.prod.protection.outlook.com] (in reply to MAIL
    FROM command)

I don’t know who is at fault here. On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the problem of spam. I am an email administrator, after all.

And by the way, it used to work. Last time I successfully sent mail to the same guy was on May 7th. So the change has been within the last week.

If Microsoft really is getting spam from 35.162.166.161 then I can’t blame them for blocking it.

On the other hand, the link they provide says essentially “sign up with ReturnPath, Inc, and we won’t piss on your head any more”. I have no idea how much an investment Microsoft has in ReturnPath, nor do I know what ReturnPath’s revenue model is.

I do not know how many IP addresses Helm uses for their outbound mail. It could be just the one. If that’s the case, I’m screwed. If they have multiple, then they need to figure out who the bad actors are, and move them. Bad guys over there, good guys over here.

That assumes that there are bad actors. I don’t know that spammers would actually go to the expense of buying a Helm email server. It wasn’t inexpensive. To just send spam, I could hire a cloud mail server far cheaper. But if someone is stupid enough to think they can make money sending spam, then maybe they are stupid enough to think that the Helm service would give them a pass. And if they did, and Helm doesn’t try to scan and block for such a thing, then yeah, it could be that I side with Microsoft here. I’d hate that; but I’d have to admit that they are on the correct side of the problem here.

35.162.166.0 is Amazon, of course. Helm is sending the mail from AWS. Of course, the Amazon model is that they will sell their services to anyone; including dirty filthy spammers, may they all get Covid-19 and expire painfully. If Amazon has lumped the Helm customers in with their spammer customers, then there may be nothing Helm can do about it.

But then, I have no way to know if Microsoft is simply pissing on email senders for using AWS. It wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft sabotaged customers for using a competing product. Is this yet another example of “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run“? Does Microsoft happen to be running ads now, with a picture of a crash helmet, and the caption “Wouldn’t you rather host your email with a cloud provider that isn’t on ReturnPath’s block list?”

Anyway. I’ve moved most of my email over to the Helm email server, and now it’s turning out to be a bad thing. Perhaps my corporate overlords are trying to punish me for straying from their cage.

Minor traffic accident

No injuries, thank God. But some serious resentment at the old loser guy on the bicycle. First, he chose to deliberately cut off the kid in the minivan; then, he laughed at the kid when the kid honked at him. This infuriated the kid, but that was bad, because the kid’s attention was no longer focused on where the minivan was heading.

I happened to get a dash cam for Christmas, so here’s the video.

Full screen is good, because I figured out how to highlight the bicyclist while he was still on the sidewalk.

My little scream at the end is freaking hilarious. I’m sure to be a chick magnet now.

My car is pretty hurt. The fender was just barely not rubbing on the tire (and sometimes it was). The steering wheel needed to be at about 2 o’clock to drive straight down the road. I didn’t go faster than 25 MPH the whole way home (which made people behind me wonder).

Bitnami phpmyadmin

Just a quick note for me to easily find and remember how to access PHP My Admin on a Bitnami WordPress instance

From the command line on my local machine:

ssh -4 -N -L 8888:www.gerisch.org:443 -i $insertpathtopemfilehere nottheadmin@gerisch.org

And then in a browser:

https://www.gerisch.org:8888/phpmyadmin

Lastly, remember that the login name to phpmyadmin is root (not the Bitnami application password, or any other user name).

Because public Internet access to PHP My Admin would be a Very Bad Idea, the Bitnami WordPress image is configured such that PHP My Admin refuses to run, if the requests don’t come through www.gerisch.org

This is a good idea.

But what that also means is that I need something listening on my www.gerisch.org address, that can forward the network traffic to the remote web server.

ssh -4 says use IP v4 addresses only (suppresses IP v6 errors if your machine doesn’t have that).

ssh -N says do not execute remote commands (all we’re going to be doing here is port forwarding).

ssh -L says local to remote port forwarding will be done.

8888:www.gerisch.org:443 says the local port to listen on is port 8888, the local address to listen on is the home address of www.gerisch.org, and when listening on the “server” www.gerisch.org, know that it will be listening for port 443 traffic (https instead of http). Another way of thinking about this is that your web browser that is throwing HTTP GETs and PUTs will be throwing them at port 8888, since that is the port the service is listening on. But when the traffic is thrown across the Internet, ssh is going to throw the traffic to www.gerisch.org port 443. Yet, www.gerisch.org:443 is really just a front for gerisch.org:443

ssh -i says to use a public/private key pair for logging in (instead of a password). $insertpathtopemfilehere is the variable that holds the path to the .pem file.

ssh nottheadmin@gerisch.org is the actual remote login name and server name.

April 2020 “May you live in interesting times”

Apocryphally there is an ancient Chinese curse that says “May you live in interesting times”. The idea is that it’s a curse (thus bad for you), and that the bad thing that is happening is that everything around you is uncertain, in turmoil, rapidly changing, and otherwise so off-balancing that one must pay close attention to avoid a fall into danger.

Well, April of 2020 is definitely interesting times. Reality is that much of commerce is shut down due to shelter-in-place orders by government. There is zero chance that many of people will be unhurt.

A few questions that surround the COVID-19 pandemic are:

  1. Is it a real danger, or exaggerated for particular gain?
  2. Is it both?
  3. If it’s exaggerated for particular gain, what are those gains?
  4. What evidence contradicts the real danger argument?

The first question, “Is it real?” Well, yes, 23,000+ dead in Italy seems like an obvious problem. Spain and France death totals are climbing, and New York City is up to 14,000+ dead. But is that more than the normal count of dead who expire during flu season? And here we have uncertain / in turmoil data.

Certainly, I don’t want my mom to die; and she is in her early 80’s. If the influenza virus, or the COVID-19 virus were to kill her, and I didn’t do all I could to reduce it’s spread, I would feel remorse.

But if the flu kills one half of a million people every year: is the 2020 death-by-influenza-like-virus count really going to be all that greater than the 2019 count? That count could be lower, actually; which would be due to the shut down of commerce.

But the second second part of the first question is perhaps re-written as “Is the declared pandemic due to COVID-19 exaggerated for particular gain?”

It’s not obvious to me that the the answer is no. I would like to be able to say that “The declared pandemic due to COVID-19 is not exaggerated by the media and government bureaucrats who use the media for manipulation.” I do not think that’s true, though.

The second question, “Is it both?” I’m inclined to say yes.

The third question, “If it’s exaggerated for particular gain, what are those gains?” Well wow, there are a lot.

  • Old school mass media is dying; good riddance. But the Oh-My-God-A-Pandemic!!! keeps the mass media on life support for a little bit longer.
  • There is a bureaucratic axiom: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Certainly this pandemic has given bureaucratic bullies ample opportunity to exert additional authority.
  • Social / technological progress: companies which would never before have considered a remote workforce are implementing it. And the air is cleaner for it.
  • A majority of old school mass media is still butt-hurt that Donald Trump got elected President. He’s going to win again, unless something can be created to discredit him. A ruined economy might do the trick.
  • Other topics that the mass media should be focusing on go by the wayside while the Oh-My-God-A-Pandemic!!! story stays top center. By the way, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.
    • Joe Biden is running for President, which is an automatic loss unless the plan is to use him as a false front. If the plan is that Joe will die / be medically retired shortly after election, then the selection of Vice President becomes crucial. I’ve heard Kamala Harris floated as the candidate. I think it would be very difficult to find a candidate with worse “insider” attributes. She is a protege of Willie Brown, and Willie Brown’s picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the phrase Corrupt Politician. The point is: it’s to the Democratic National Committee’s benefit for people to not be looking at their candidate for VP too closely or for very long. The more time spent looking at their candidate, the more time to find something wrong. If they had a good candidate, we would have seen it by now.
    • Senators saw the pandemic coming, and profited: Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Dianne Feinstein, and Jim Inhofe. These people should be prosecuted and jailed.
    • The EARN-IT Act, designed to break privacy of all Internet users.
    • The Hong Kong protests, as people there want independence from communist China, and Hong Kong is a bright jewel of capitalism. Just how much force should governments use against their citizens?
    • Brexit / no- Brexit – the saga of a government doing stupid things continues.
    • Equifax breach. Not only did they fuck up their data security, they made a profit off it. And government prosecuted no-one (really).
    • A local issue for me is the California High Speed Rail debacle; $77 billion of waste and no politician with the integrity to kill it. $2,000 per man, woman, and child in California (tax dollars) right into the shitter. Stop it!
  • The point of all the above sub-bullet points is that government at the grand scale is often incompetent or malevolent (perhaps accidentally, but not always), and if we weren’t looking at the pandemic, the media couldn’t help but look at government. But the mass media likes government; it holds their leash, and they provide content to wrap the ads around.
  • Government spending: every politician loves to be the hero, spending your money to rescue somebody from a problem. A pandemic is a wonderful excuse to spend money with little or no oversight. All these government workers working from home: you didn’t expect them to use their personal cell phones, did you? And from a legal discovery point of view: you don’t want personal and government business mixed on the same device. That wasn’t a concern when their contact phone number was the office phone number; but now we need call-back numbers and they sure as heck should not be the personal home phone number of the case worker. Other spending opportunities: schools with Chromebooks, Zoom teleconferencing, webcams, SAAS in The Cloud. All of these are excuses to buy stuff we could have done without (and kept expenses lower) but; now is a great excuse to spend, spend, spend. We’re stimulating the economy!
  • Congressional spending: the funding bills had all sorts of pork / unrelated administrative bullshit attached. Many of the ideas would never have flown, had they been reviewed on their own merits alone. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
  • Putting people in their place, by removing the government service of the public school system. Some of you did not appreciate what a little rat-asshole your little angel is, until the little angel was sent home to live with you for a couple months. You should fix your kid. Fixing your kid has always been your job; never the teacher’s. Long term, it would be best for your kid, too. Sending your kid home to you confronts the issue in a way your kid’s teacher (or even school district) never could.
  • Conditioning people to be even more dependent on government services. If you understand that every dollar the government spends comes out of your wallet, you’d rather they spend less. But if the government bails you out, you are the welfare recipient now. It will be that much more difficult for you to complain about excessive government spending when you were one of the recipients. Hypocrisy much? No – you have more integrity than that; unless (pandemix).
  • Unifying disaster: the pandemic. It’s no secret that there has been an increasing divide between people who earn their self-worth, and people who feel entitled. This divide became wider during the Donald Trump versus Hilary Clinton presidential campaign. The pandemic resets expectations. Trivial childishness is seen for what it is. What about the barber, shut down, who can no longer feed his family of four? That’s important.

The fourth question is “What evidence contradicts the real danger argument?”

I think another way of asking this is “If this danger is so real, what orders are examples of actual safety, and what orders are bullshit to make the bureaucrats feel powerful?” The orders are Shelter In Place also known as Stay Home and Keep Socially Distant.

I see the value in keeping everyone separate. If the transmission process is an infected person exhales, and a non-infected person inhales (which is the typical infection path for influenza-like viruses), then Shelter In Place / Stay Home and Keep Socially Distant makes a lot of sense. And in the first week, a ton of people did it.

We’re putting up with the destruction of commerce for the little guy because it’s all about keeping people from an early death. Right?

And then a week later, the ice cream shops were suddenly essential services and open for take-out. What the hell?

I’m still getting junk mail. A printer at the junk mail printer could be coughing all sorts of germs all over the crap that gets delivered to me. What is so essential about me getting sales crap to tell me to buy shit I don’t need, and which is obviously immediately going into the trash.

Are the politicians going to barbers / hair dressers? Is a barber / hair dresser suddenly an essential service when it’s a bureaucrat who needs a hair cut?

Let’s cut to the chase: is looking good an essential service?

Are politicians and/or bureaucrats to be excused from breaking Shelter In Place / Stay Home and Keep Socially Distant if they get that essential service of looking good? Because it’s all about keeping people looking good on TV, right?

Your grandparent or parent or cousin may have died, and you are prevented from going to the funeral because a large gathering of people might increase the pandemic; but Gavin Newsom needs to look good, right? He needs to be able to go onsite for the television appearance, because his speech means more, if the background is out in public, right? You have to Shelter In Place, but the governor, well he’s not a peon that ought to follow the peon rules.

Which makes me wonder about the validity of the rules at all.

Perhaps the rules are good, and good decent people are doing Shelter In Place. Maybe it’s only the politicians and bureaucrats holding press conferences who aren’t many weeks past that last haircut who are the hypocrites. But nothing about that causes me to gain respect for them. And if I don’t respect them, then I do question their motives.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

COVID-19, new water heater, WordPress annoyances, Zoom meetings, oh my

Wow a lot of stuff has happened since my last post. I’m still catching up; but, I didn’t want to go too long without pointing out I’m still alive.

COVID-19: John Hopkins University has some computer science students who are doing data gathering and mapping that on to ArcGIS. The web page works as a status report of where we are today. Thanks to Ars Technica for the original article.

Today, Italy went over the 10,000 dead mark.

New Water Heater: I went two weeks without hot water. I am grateful this was before COVID-19, because I used my gym membership for my daily hot shower. In fact, a friend of mine, way back when, pointed out that if you ever go homeless, a gym membership is a way to stay human for around $20 per month.

And now the gyms are closed due to COVID-19. Well that hurts the homeless even more.

The whole water heater debacle deserves a post of it’s own, so I will do that, later.

WordPress Annoyances: there are things that don’t work, and, the WordPress Support Forums are a mass of dead and empty posts of people asking for help. Other forms of help don’t seem to be, either.

I want to migrate between sites, and from single-site to multisite, but man this stuff just does not work.

Zoom Meetings: Man oh man, I wish I had listened to my stock picking guys when they said Zoom was the new hotness in video conferencing over the Internet. Zoom stock price has nearly doubled since then. And now, even I use Zoom, and I know of three people who signed up to pay a monthly subscription. By the way, Discord is pretty cool, too.

Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves that they couldn’t leverage their leadership with Skype and Teams into being the industry leader. Of course Google had a shot way back when with Hangouts, too. Google though is just kind of a big failure to get anything done since merging with Doubleclick and abandoning the whole “Don’t be evil” motto.

New site steps

Note this is for a new WordPress Multisite

  • Log into AWS Management Console
  • Lightsail → Create a new instance (Linux, WordPress Multisite)
  • Create a new static IP address
  • Assign the static IP address to the new instance.
  • Buy a new domain name (if I don’t have one available) – in this case, gerisch.org
  • Update DNS with the new static IP address
  • ssh – i path-to-pem-file-for-AWS-instances bitnami@gerisch.org
  • Make Ubuntu like OpenSUSE
  • Log out, and log back in (get the benefits of pageup for history search, and .. as the cd .. alias)
  • cd /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress
  • sudo ./bnconfig --machine_hostname gerisch.org
  • sudo mv bnconfig bnconfig.disabled
  • sudo apt upgrade
  • sudo init 6
  • wait for reboot to finish
  • ssh – i path-to-pem-file-for-AWS-instances bitnami@gerisch.org
  • sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

At this point, I get a warning:

Warning: Custom redirections are not supported in the Bitnami WordPress Multisite Stack. This tool will not be able to enable/disable redirections.
Press [Enter] to continue:

An updated version is available. Would you like to download it? You would need to run it manually later. [Y/n]:

sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

Welcome to the Bitnami HTTPS Configuration tool.

Domains

Please provide a valid space-separated list of domains for which you wish to configure your web server.

Domain list []:

gerisch.org

The following domains were not included: www.gerisch.org. Do you want to add them? [Y/n]:

The interesting thing here is that (if I’m interpreting things correctly) that WordPress Multisite really does not want one of the subdomains to be www.gerisch.org – yet here, Bitnami, through the Let’s Encrypt really does want one of the domains to be www

I hit <Enter> which signifies yes

Changes to perform

The following changes will be performed to your Bitnami installation:

  1. Stop web server
  2. Configure web server to use a free Let’s Encrypt certificate for the domains:
    gerisch.org www.gerisch.org
  3. Configure a cron job to automatically renew the certificate each month
  4. Configure web server name to: gerisch.org
  5. Start web server once all changes have been performed

Do you agree to these changes? [Y/n]:

I hit <Enter> which signifies yes

Create a free HTTPS certificate with Let’s Encrypt

Please provide a valid e-mail address for which to associate your Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Domain list: gerisch.org www.gerisch.org

Server name: gerisch.org

E-mail address []:

I put in my personal email address

The Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement can be found at:

https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf

Do you agree to the Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement? [Y/n]:

I hit <Enter> which signifies yes

And after a bit of work, the configuration of my new web site to be SSL protected is complete.

More power sleep Linux stuff – or how to set permissions to make a keystroke out of it

This command does successfully put the computer to sleep (and thus the screens eventually go dark and no longer light up the room like stadium lighting):

echo freeze > /sys/power/state

But mere mortals don’t have permission to do that.

I added a script in /etc/init.d which does a chmod 666 /sys/power/state on startup (see the previous post about editing /etc/init.d/after.local)

Credit where credit is due: a gentleman named Aaron Ball posted this at his web site oper.io – clever logo, too, to combine the power switch icon as “.io” – but I digress.

Then another tiny script that simply does the echo command for me:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/echo freeze > /sys/power/state

I had started to go down the road of a sudoers file entry, which would give anyone permission to run this script; but the problem isn’t who runs the command. The problem is that the target of the echo command, /sys/power/state, isn’t going to allow writing by a script (even if run by sudo).

Last step was to add a keystroke to my KDE shortcuts. System Settings –> Custom Shortcuts –> Edit –> New –> Global Shortcuts

Name the action, assign the keystrokes to invoke it, and make the action the tiny script above. Works like a charm. 🙂

AMD Ryzen 1700 and power sleep failure

I had bought all the parts for a new system at the end of 2017, and was mostly happy with it. The motherboard was an AS Rock Taichi and the CPU was an AMD Ryzen 1700. I bought the highest MHz AMD Ryzen I could get except I avoided the 220 Watts TDP; power draw on this chip is about 65 Watts TDP.

Certainly, I was thrilled with system performance, and very reasonable price. But sleep states were a problem. The system would go so deep into sleep, it would never wake up. I would have to press and hold the power switch to get it back: not good. Once in a while, the box would freeze hard too; usually while scrolling a Facebook page. So I had this sense of unease that I’d made a mistake buying the AS Rock Taichi X370 and trying to run Linux on it.

This last birthday, I bought myself a replacement motherboard: an MSI X470 Gaming Plus. I spent my birthday pulling out the Taichi motherboard and putting in the 470GP.

And my ACPI sleep problems did not go away. Rats!

I’ve taken some vacation time, and looking through the log files, I did find an error message that lead me to some vital information. The AMD Ryzen 1700 has an ACPI sleep state – C6 – which Linux doesn’t play nice with. A patch was offered to the Linux maintainers, but not accepted. I don’t know why, and I’m not sure it matters, either.

But what someone did, is make a Python script that pokes and prods the correct bits in the Ryzen 1700 to have it declare that ACPI sleep state C6 is not available / should not be used.

I haven’t had a sleep state problem with this rig since. 😀

First, I needed this: Github ZenStates. I saved this script as /home/myhomelocation/zenstates.py

Then I needed two bash scripts to run it after system startup:

/etc/init.d/after.local

which contains (and is executable): 

#!/bin/sh
/etc/init.d/set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.sh

/etc/init.d/set_c6_acpi_state_disabled.sh

which contains (and is executable):

#!/bin/sh
# ScriptName=set_c6_acpi_state_disabled
/usr/bin/python /home/myhomelocation/zenstates.py --c6-disable

In theory, this could be a single script: after.local could be the script to run the Python script zenstates.py. But what if I find I want more than one script to run after system startup? This way, I just add another line to after.local

This week I talked with my brother, who found a relevant piece of information (while researching something else). Apparently AMD will give me a new CPU that doesn’t have this problem, as a warranty repair. So I guess this is AMD being honorable enough to admit they made a mistake here; that is nice. The caveat is, they cannot trust people to not fry their CPU and use this as an excuse to get a replacement under warranty. So the drill becomes: get an RMA from AMD, remove the Ryzen 1700, ship it (at my cost) to them, they test the CPU to make sure it’s not fried (is otherwise good except for the C6 power state problem), and then they ship a replacement. Total turnaround time is probably one month.

Do I want this, my main system, to be down for a month until the AMD CPU RMA SOP EOP FTW? The warranty on the CPU is three years, and I bought it two and a quarter ago.

I think I’m good, with just a software patch. I’m just happy that r4m0n found and supplied a patch.

Thank you r4m0n. 🙂

AT&T bill – something that (seems to me) should be illegal

I received my bill in the mail on Friday, February 7th, 2020. The bill says it should be paid by February 15, 2020. Trying to squeeze people into late charges much?

The bill says it’s Issue Date is January 25, 2020 – two weeks prior to delivery. Of course, it’s prepaid bulk mail, so there is no actual postmark.

I remember the Post Office doing some new initiative where they get mail to us in 24 hours (although I assume that applies to local delivery only). I don’t think this is a post office problem. My guess is that AT&T is just being a shitty company. Hard to prove, though.

Way back when, I remember a consultant telling us of a mainframe that printed checks on the other side of the country. ZIP code starts with 9? Print it on the East Coast and mail it from there. ZIP code starts with 0 (zero)? Print it on the West Coast and mail it from there.

This could be something similar. Or, it could actually be that they just put a pallet full of paper bills on a storage rack for two weeks, and then sent them out.