My opinions, worth every penny you paid me for them
If I have any sort of privacy controls enabled, the Rocket Mortgage web site does not work. They have some sort of cross-site scripting going on where they throw something at https://streaming.split.io/ (which is actually a ably.com )
Even when I tell Firefox to keep everything together in the same container, Rocket Mortgage fails it. My only choice to get it to work is to disable all privacy controls.
Thanks, Rocket Mortgage. I simply love you for pimping out my data to advertising johns. Not.
I’ve got two devices which tell me that the HomePod is on the wrong Wi-Fi network. Yes, I can believe that. Care to help a fellow out and fix it? Apparently that’s not a thing they had to program.
Extra points to Apple that the electric power plug cannot be disconnected at the device; but requires me to crawl under my desk and unplug it from the wall. I have no idea if a hard reboot by unplugging the power will help, but that appears to be the only option.
At least the Amazon Echo devices had particular button sequences for various levels of reset. Also, the power cord detached at the device, too.
But Apple is too cool for buttons and plugs. You dimwits.
Anyone can whine; how about a solution, David? Sure. It’s stupid, but it works:
I don’t know. Maybe the people at Apple never thought people ought to secure their home with more than one Wi-Fi network?
sudo postconf -e 'maximal_queue_lifetime = 1d'
I get it: some random guy sets up a new mail server, and you don’t know him from Adam, so you block his email.
They blocked me with a 400 series error. My new Postfix server had the default configuration of waiting five days before giving up. That wasn’t great, because I thought I’d sent an email, but the recipient never got it.
This failure was particularly irritating because my financial advisor needed me to sign an actual piece of paper to change the business relationship. She emailed me a document. It came across in her email that she was concerned about timing, this was rather urgent. I printed the document, signed it, and then emailed her back (on January 4) that I signed the document, but my schedule was such that I wouldn’t be able to bring the document to her office until Friday the 6th. Now I find out that Proofpoint never let my server send her that email; from her point of view I just completely shined her on.
That explains the weird look the receptionist gave me when I showed up on Friday with the signed document. They thought I had ghosted her. I didn’t: Proofpoint had decided to be a bully by stringing my mail server along with a 400 series error, until my mail server gave up and I finally got the 500 series error: blocked.
500 series errors are “it didn’t work, and it’s never going to work, what you are trying failed, we’re done.” 400 series errors on the other hand are “whoops – something went wrong, but it may be on our end rather than yours.”
I think it is a little disingenuous for Proofpoint to reply with a 400 series error “whoops – something went wrong, but it may be on our end rather than yours” when it was never going to get better. They blocked me because my mail server is new, and doesn’t have any reputation with them. That’s not going to get better on it’s own.
The big difference between 400 and 500 series errors is that 500 series errors are known problems. Because they are known problems, the results should be sent back immediately. 400 series errors have traditionally been allowed five days before the sending mail server reports an error. The idea behind 400 series errors was that perhaps you need time to fix a problem: so the sending mail server will try for five days before giving up. Perhaps you are moving to a new data center and you need a whole weekend to migrate. If you start Friday night and are done my Monday morning, the people sending you email will still get their messages to your users. It took several days, but eventually the email got there.
On the other hand, if I am sending an email to not-an-actual-user@some-real-domain.tld then the receiving mail server can immediately give me a 500 series error: not-an-actual-user does not exist. It didn’t work, it’s never going to work, what you are trying failed, we’re done. The sender (me) learns immediately that I mis-typed the email address or something.
I’ve recently gotten some DSN Fails trying to send to @icloud.com users. Same reason: they don’t know my mail server from Adam; but at least Apple was kind enough to let me know immediately that the mail didn’t go. I can at least text the person what I was going to send them in email.
Off-topic but mildly interesting: I had a user at work mis-type an email address by tacking on an extra period at the end. Like they finished a sentence with a period, but this was an email address. DNS has a top level, but to climb the tree means adding a trailing period and doing another DNS query. In other words, my computer could try to look up “mybox” and if that doesn’t resolve, tack a period on the end and look again. That would resolve to “mybox.mydomain”. If that doesn’t resolve, tack a period on the end and look again. That would resolve to “mybox.mydomain.tld” So when the resolution process finally gets to the very top Top Level Domain (TLD), searching stops. Those TLDs are a defined list; which is how DNS knows that there’s no more searching to be done. But whoops if the user asked for mybox.mydomain.tld. <—notice the trailing period. Then DNS is going to keep returning a 400 series error: it looks like there should be an upper level domain, but nothing responded, so maybe that box is just down right now? Try again in a few minutes. Five days later, my user finally got the DSN Fail. He was ticked off: why couldn’t the computer tell him he’d mistyped the email address? Well, because it kept looking for a mail server higher up in the DNS name hierarchy than .com
The time frame is October through December 2022
Dear FutureMe,
Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.
How is your personal life going?
How is your work life going?
How is your volunteer service life going?
Personal Life:
Work Life
Volunteer Service
Irons in the fire:
Do I want to watch television? Or maybe check out YouTube for a Home Assistant tutorial? I decided to try YouTube on the television set. I do the search terms, I find a video with more than 1 million views, and I hit play.
First, Google wants to play an ad. It is so fucking stupid that I’m out.
Back to HBO for me.
I suppose someone thought that being outrageous was clever. Instead, they just confirmed my suspicions that YouTube, on the television, is simply a waste of time.
I chuckled at a recent observation by someone: Google gets paid to put ads on YouTube. Then they put unskippable ads on YouTube. Then they offer to let you pay to skip those ads. “Get paid to create the problem, get paid to solve the problem. Genius.”
As I mentioned before, The Helm email appliance company is calling it quits, which I understand. If the business isn’t going to make it, it is better to pull the plug than just keep letting things linger. Best of luck to them on their next adventure.
So, what did I do?
ssh-copy-id without getting in first and lowering the root login barrier. The certbot to add gerisch.org to the domains list is going to have to wait.My grandfather on my dad’s side was an immigrant from Germany, between World War I and World War 2. His parents put him on a ship and sent him to the USA when he was sixteen years old. Although it sucked for him that he never saw his family again, in many ways his new future was that he lived the American Dream. One of the things he did was buy stocks. In the 1970’s (before there were VCRs) on Sunday nights, there was a television show on PBS named Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser. So we’d visit, and on Sunday nights, Grandpa would tell us kids to settle down; he needed to watch this TV show.
One Sunday, Mr. Rukeyser had a guest on who was going to pitch IBM as a good stock buy. (In 1974-76 that was great advice. Today I wouldn’t touch them). So during the intro, Mr. Rukeyser says “In the movie The Graduate Mr. Maguire tells Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman): I want to say one word to you, Benjamin. Plastics, young man: Plastics. If Mr. Maguire were talking to Benjamin today, he’d say Computers, young man: computers.”
And I thought to myself “I’m a young man….”
I did sign up for a computer programming class in High School. It was an IBM System 3 mini-mainframe, with 4 KB of RAM and punched cards. So I programmed my first computer in 1979. Dr. Larry Ray was our instructor, and one of the most insightful lessons he taught us was to calculate a loan payment schedule, with interest. Wow what an eye-opener the intrerest charges are on loans! But I digress.
My dad thought that getting in to computers was a good idea. I had one friend that got an Apple microcomputer, and my best friend got a Commodore 64. I saw a new computer being advertised that not only was the full hardware package, it came with software too: Obsorne 1. I had the later model one with the blue plastic case. But the kicker with this one was a sale that threw in the dBase II database program. It had everything, for the low low price of $2,200. My dad gave me half the money, and I ponied up the other half.
My last year of High School, I started working at Truline Corporation, a manufacturer of printed wiring boards. I started as a driller. But eventually I migrated up to programming the Numerical Control router (profiler) which cut the boards out of the sheet of fiberglass. This was the G-code programming language. Eventually, the factory needed some space, and moved me across the parking lot in with the president of the company. By this time, I was the “engineer” who measured the artwork, compared it against the blueprints, and created the work order the factory would work. I worked up a program in my Osborne to produce work orders on a printer instead of by hand. I showed it to the president, Jack Cederloff, and he told me that if I learned to program their computer, he’d hire me as their programmer. I was thrilled.
I went to night school to learn the language of their mini-mainframe. The computer was an IBM System/34. I learned RPG II. Eventually Truline moved to an IBM System/36, and I became a professional programmer, eight hours a day, five days a week, for two and a half years. I loved it.
The full error is
Cannot select database
The database server could be connected to (which means your username and password is okay) but the database could not be selected.
What is actually wrong is that you don’t have a file wp-config.php
From what I gather, it used to be that wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz would bring in a .tar.gz file which contained wp-config.php. That file isn’t there any more in the source.
In the old scheme, the installer would modify it with the user name, password, database table name and then proceed with the rest of the installation.
If I had to guess, I’d guess the new scheme is supposed to do cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php and then the installation picks up as it did before (modifying it with the user name, password, database table name); then proceeding with the rest of the installation.
Someone got the idea that instead of maintaining two wp-config files, they could maintain and ship one, and then copy it during install. This is a good idea: makes the source a tiny bit smaller, saving storage and transfer bytes. Just one thing though: do the copy, stupid, and check your results. Err out in a rather ugly mess if you didn’t get the copy right – then at least you’d hear about it mightily if you got it wrong.
The solution is to manually copy the file, edit it with the user name, password, and database table name, and then try to install again, twice.
If you simply copy wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php and then run the install, it’s going to bark at you that wp-config.php already exists. Also, it is not going to ask you for the user name, password, and database table name. Since you already had to fuck around with the wp-config.php file, surely you already took care of the user name, password, and database table name.
So,
Finally the “famous five minute install” is done after you spent thirty minutes in frustration finding this post and not doing what the documentation says.
Personally, I think it is low quality programming to leave this bug in the basic install process. It’s been there for months. So, what? No-one at Automattic tests the installer any more?
This happened Wednesday December 14, at 8:24 AM. I was wondering when Amazon was going to deliver this package, so I checked the order page, and they said they had delivered it already. I checked the Ring video doorbell history, and here is the thief.
I really liked my The Helm email appliance. But because the company running the service behind it is going to exit this business, I need to migrate stuff. Oh so much stuff…..
Of course, really, it becomes so-much-stuff because once I’m in a little, I want to pile on more. If Reddit hadn’t become so much trash, I’d have probably been living in /r/SelfHosted these past few weeks. Well, that and except that I’m cloud hosting for myself instead of keeping a box here at home.
Anyway, The Helm provided me with a SMTP server on it’s own domain name, and, NextCloud Files. (It did not include any other parts of NextCloud, though) (I think. Maybe contacts, too?). The company provided DNS services, too. And because no ISP is going to let me run an SMTP server here inside my home, it provided VPN services to AWS where boxes on the public Internet could send port 25 mail from.
I needed to move, and move quick. I’ve seen before how “oh I’ve got plenty of time” turned into “oh crap! It’s due tomorrow‽” enough times to remember the pain.
So now I have learned and am running:
I’m least happy with NextCloud. There is a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, and the documentation is poor, and a lot of the forum answers are “just read the documentation, newbie.”
I’m also not really happy with Duplicati. I loved it in version 1, because it was “just” a Python script. It ran on Windows, and I could very easily back up to Amazon S3. In fact, it was my introduction to learning AWS. Version 2 comes with it’s own web server so that it can be cross-platform and have a GUI; but that means adding Mono to my previously somewhat lean Linux server. By the way, accessing a web site on a “localhost” only web server? Here’s a reminder of how.
I started seeing a memory leak, and now I have to reboot the server once in a while. As Tenets of IT number 6 points out, rebooting is a band-aid. Really, I should remove the code that creates the memory leak. I think I’ll move to Restic and Backblaze.
Though I realy want to add WordPress and migrate this blog there, next.