Computers – Page 3 – DavidPierron.Com

Mac Self Assigned IP Address

If you’ve arrived here due to this problem, invest a little time with me and you may have the resolution that you need, not a quick fix. Almost all resolutions to this problem have resulted in everything immediately working again only to have the same problem occur an hour, a day or a week later.

Again, I will stress that you don’t want to jump to a hasty conclusion. Read my whole post if you can suffer through my writing. There may be a solution here, but you need to determine which solution it is. I’ll provide my story after the common solutions.

If you do a Google Search on “mac self assigned ip”, you get a couple Apple Forum results: Mac OS: How to release and renew a DHCP lease which refers you to this post: AirPort troubleshooting guide, and of these suggestions or resolutions nothing worked for me.

In doing final research before posting this bLog entry, I happened on this Mac Rumors Thread which started: Nov 10, 2007, 01:30 PM and receives posts to this day. To cut to the chase, here is the important info from that thread as posted by Mac Rumors user “ted400”

This thread has begun to take on a life of it’s own, so to make it easier to navigate here is a summary of usable troubleshooting steps. These are the steps which have helped most people rectify their self-assigned address (169.x.x.x) problem:

1) Check your firewall on your affected computer to be sure it is not blocking your NIC or ports 67-68 for DHCP
The easiest way is:
1) Go to System Preferencess -> Security,
2) In the Firewall tab, choose either “Allow all incoming connections” or “Allow all essential services”

2) Flush your ipfw cache
a) In Terminal type: sudo ipfw list _then press enter
b) In one of the lines it shows what ip addresses are being allowed, like this:”allow any from 192.168.0.0 to 24″
c) If this is different from your router then flush the rules with the following command: sudo ipfw flush

3) Check your keychain permissions for your Network login
a) open your keychain and look for your network log in password
b) open the password key and under the access control tab make sure the “Allow All Applications to Access This Item” is selected.

Still having problems after finishing these steps? Give detailed information such as the IP address you receive, the version of your OS, the configuration of your router (DHCP or static), etc. etc. and we can continue to troubleshoot this. Hopefully 10.5.2 can address this problem as that update is now up to a whopping 450MB! Tons of fixes coming soon…be patient.

I believe that answer 3 above is the correct one, but read on.

My airport story from the beginning: I got the best MacBook Pro 17″ money could buy (in a standard configuration of 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo, 2G RAM, 200G 7200 HD, matte HiRes display 1920×1200) August 2008. You can bet I wasn’t happy when 2 months later Apple upgraded all of their laptop computers. I wrote a post about it. Basically, I missed out on 2G of additional RAM and a bit faster CPU I think, but I try not to think about it. Anyway …

Initially I got the MacBook Pro home and it connected to my wireless network with no trouble. I had to specify the network cause I didn’t advertise my SSID. Through the update and some shutdowns and sleeps the network was always found without problem. Then wireless started to get “iffy” … It would be non responsive or would seem to have disappeared. You would go into the Network Preferences and “Status” would show “Self Assigned IP Address” and you couldn’t connect to the Internet. Your local network would show in Network Name etc, but no connectivity. How did this make any sense?

Renewing your DHCP lease did nothing, and if you might have managed to renew the lease, it sometimes still would not work. My solution would come when I would restart the router. If I did that, the MacBook Pro would connect right up. Sometimes a couple hours, sometimes a couple days or more. However I arrived at the problem in connectivity, the resolution was to restart the router. (Power cycle). This became quite a nuisance since you didn’t know whether or not the restart would be required. There were other computers depending on that router, so a power cycle would knock them off. In some cases file transfers running that would dead stop and then take a while to get back up to speed.

The router: D-Link WBR-1310 Wireless G with built in 4 port 10/100 Switch. Other computers attached: Microsoft Windows XP Desktop connected to Cat5 port, XboX 360 in Cat5 port, Microsoft Windows Vista on Acer Laptop connected wirelessly. When the MacBook Pro would fail, the Microsoft Windows Vista would not. It always connected.

So, after a while of Googling for a simple resolution and none working, I gave up and plugged a cable into the ethernet port and there the 17″ portable sat. Then I tethered it to a 24″ external screen, Apple keyboard and mouse, external HDs and a sound system with sub-woofer. It’s an extravagant laptop system masquerading as a desktop with multiple screens.

This past March, I decided to take advantage of those people selling off their old MacBook Pro 15s. There were a lot of them on eBay at the time and ones reasonably priced went quick and those that auctioned went beyond reality.

I found an auction with a MacBook Pro that appeared in good condition and was obviously last generation (there were older ones up too and if you don’t know Macs, you might get something you didn’t expect). Mine had no warranty but came with EyeTV hardware, Parallels and Microsoft Office 2008 Home/Student Edition. I executed the Buy It Now and waited by my front door. When it arrived I powered it up and got it connected to the Internet wirelessly and started the Mac updates. Then I decided to check out the Microsoft stuff so I clicked on the funky Word icon in the dock. It wouldn’t run until it was updated. So, I started to let it update. The update was sluggish, uncomfortable and I saw the words “Microsoft Update is now running” (or something like that) and I decided, BYE! I blew away the whole HD. I didn’t want any parts of Microsoft on the Mac. Unfortunately the seller didn’t have the EyeTV serial and “Elgato doesn’t support ebay purchases” so I would have to purchase their $80 software. Google fixed that for me.

MacBook Pro 15 with a fresh OSX install … The wireless problems start to happen again. I swear it started after updating to the latest Leopard 10.5.6 but I don’t necessarily think that it mattered, I think the time frame is a coincidence. So here we are again, a problem that I thought may have been specific to my 17″ that I don’t recall if I ever pursued Apple Care? but I know I forum’d it up. So, again, I head to the Google and look for a solution to the intermittent Airport connectivity finally resulting in a self-assigned IP address problem.

The most frustrating thing about this problem and all the steps taken to try to resolve it is this; Once you try something, sometimes it fixes it right away and you feel that you’ve been successful … This isn’t always the case … You know, it’s like typing a key and it doesn’t respond, so hitting it harder was probably what was needed. After the first two harder hits, the third much harder hit would surely produce a result. No. So, here are the steps I took that sometimes worked, but ultimately always failed.

MOST COMMON FORUM (NON)SOLUTIONS
A common suggestion is to open the firewall. I go to Apple > System Preferences > Security > Firewall and “Allow all incoming connections” is already checked, No firewall has ever been set. So, this is default behavior of a fresh OSX install, to not have the firewall enabled. (and this is fine by me since my firewall is at the connection to the network, all machines need not be bogged down by software firewalls).

As learned from the Mac Rumors forum, Macs also run a secondary firewall called ipfw and you can access its rule set by dropping out to the Terminal. Listed on the left is my rule set displayed. That rule listed at the left is saying allow everything, so there are no restrictions there either. It makes me wonder how people who aren’t as technical as me have had changes made to either firewall. Incidentally, ipfw used to guard my entire network until I switched to pf … Hopefully if the Mac is utilizing ipfw that it will eventually consider the switch to pf as it is the much better BSD solution.

This next one was especially fun. Delete particular .plist files from Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration … While this answer was garnered from a bLog that claimed ‘finally success’ and this solved everything, again, the solution didn’t survive although worked. I did find a difference in the files and saved the before and afters to compare. It was a single boolean value. I went through a safe-boot boogie and this was to solve everything. I think the booting served to start/stop the airport if anything and once again we started at a starting point that worked, although again still, wasn’t solved.

Delete particular .plist files from your User/etc etc … More of the same. No lasting results.

Static IP: So I started manually typing in the IP address, the gateway and the DNS server to resolve addresses. But connectivity would become intermittent and then fail. Nothing reliable. Nothing stable. Then would switch to DHCP and get an IP address assigned, then might work or hop to self-assigned. Frustration mounting and mounting.

So I buckled down and called Apple Care. I paid for it, I should use it. (I always tell people who call me with questions that they paid for support, they should use it). I called Apple Care March 30, 2009 at 10:25a EDT and was on the phone for 45 minutes with Aaron. I had 3 questions which I prepared on a list in front of me. One: the auto-enroll shows up in a different spot than you’d think on the website, Two: The MacBook Pro bought on ebay has no Apple Care and N-O I can’t purchase Apple Care once it’s already been out of its original warranty, Three: Airport Problem. Went through everything I tried and we also tried going through setting up a new user and replicating the problem there. He suggested to go to an Apple Authorized service place and have them do a Archive restore or something, but basically reload the whole system and restore my stuff from backup. We determined that this was probably not going to show any results since I had basically started from scratch with the fresh OSX install. But, I think that was a step on its way into becoming more serious to Apple Care. That’s how the call was left, so there is not going to be any follow up.

This is the second problem I called Apple Care about and the person on the other end acts as though I’m the first person with this problem. The other problem was the MacBook whistling iSight and now with this Airport. In both instances I told them they had to be kidding me since it is all over the Internet including their own support forums. When my iSight issue wasn’t resolved, I returned the MacBook as defective (which it was and still is no matter what anyone says!) … Apple on its way to crap … Anyway, so pushing the Apple buttons by saying that my Acer Vista laptop connects every time, the Apple Care guy said he didn’t think it was the wireless router … I swear he said that, and then when I asked him to repeat that, he said he didn’t say that it wasn’t but that he doubted it … So, that was weird … and by the way, I was using the Apple Care for my 17″ MBP (even though both have the same problem).

Not satisfied, nothing I tried worked. Cycling the router just isn’t an option anymore. The 17″ is hooked to it as well as the XP and Vista laptop and XboX 360. Too much syncing going on to want to even mess with all that stuff.

So, I replaced the router.

Frustration mounted and I’ve been doing file transfers between machines so I figured an upgraded router (with a 10/100/1000 switch) would help. The Macs are the only machines with Gigabit ethernet in them (I highly doubt XboX has gigabit?) but they’re also equipped with N class wireless, so I should jump from 54Mbps G to 300Mbps N, yes? So I trotted off to Best Buy and bought the Belkin F5D8235-4 router. Besides the N wireless and Gigabit 4 port switch, it also has a USB port to share an external HD or a printer or something. I removed an external HD offa there real quick as performance was horrible, but everything else is just dandy.

I installed the Belkin I’m pretty sure was Thursday, April 2nd in the evening. The MBP 17 and 15 have both used nothing but wireless since. I’ve slept them and shutdown a couple times and haven’t had issue. So it’s been about a week and a half. That’s pretty much a success, but I wanted to wait until I took the 15″ out with me and powered it up elsewhere where it would sniff some other networks. It seemed that that was an issue to failure was taking it out and confusing it … This time back, no problems …

While my solution so far has been hardware, the solution above is software and it the permission on the keychain … I am almost tempted to hook the D-Link back up and try that as I see the permissions on that keychain are not open to everyone, but again, I have not had issue since swapping out the router. I have been asked in the past to allow the Network Preferences access to the keychain, so I don’t necessarily know why changing the permissions should work since whomever wants access should prompt for it, but I guess that’s why the failure, something isn’t working right, they just haven’t found it yet.

I think it’s some sort of timeout. I think the Mac wants a quick answer but the older wireless routers aren’t as fast. Windows will wait forever for an answer so maybe that’s why my laptop works. It does take a while for the network to become active while on a Mac it’s ready almost immediately … So, I’m guessing a timeout and a newer router gives a faster response, and possibly the permission problem aids the Mac in not needing to wait for an answer or something and the Mac gets the connection a little later without issue.

So there you have it … If I start having problems I will post an update, but I figured a week and a half was pretty good. If I do have issue, the first thing I am trying is the keychain permission … All those solutions I read where they solved their problem, I can’t believe they’re still solved based on my experience, so why haven’t they updated? BAH! The Internet …

FreeBSD and Phusion Passenger

If I don’t write this one down I won’t remember it, especially at this hour when I finally got it to work! I was having a devil of a time on the passenger-install-apache2-module … While it says it “found” everything, I guess it really didn’t … The Apache2 Portable Runtime stuff apparently needs directories to be found. Inevitably, this is how I got it to work:

setenv APXS2 /usr/local/sbin/apxs
setenv APR_CONFIG /usr/local/lib/apache2/apr-config
setenv APU_CONFIG /usr/local/lib/apache2/apu-config

Of course, I found those one at a time Googling all over the Internet and the last was found within the source notes at github … A bunch of what I found had nothing to do with FBSD … Anyway, so the result should look something like this when run:

Checking for required software...

* GNU C++ compiler... found at /usr/bin/g++
* Ruby development headers... found
* OpenSSL support for Ruby... found
* RubyGems... found
* Rake... found at /usr/local/bin/rake
* Apache 2... found at /usr/local/sbin/httpd
* Apache 2 development headers... found at /usr/local/sbin/apxs
* Apache Portable Runtime (APR) development headers... found at /usr/local/lib/apache2/apr-config
* Apache Portable Runtime Utility (APR) development headers... found at /usr/local/lib/apache2/apu-config
* fastthread... found
* rack... found

Sheesh!

Web 2.0 and oh, nice to see you …

Web 2.0: Gaetan sent an invite to my email address to follow him on twitter, so I signed up finally. Honestly, I had actually been meaning to sign up with twitter and facebook … My older brother is terrified of facebook, he thinks Rupert Murdoch is after him … I’m particular in the information I share but let’s be honest, if someone like Rupert Murdoch wanted the goods on you, guess what? He’s going to get you …

There are so many times that I think of something to blog, but I never get around to it. I think of the situation, the story and everything, but then I don’t get to it. Or, maybe the paranoia of what I would be posting and the opinion that may come of it, or too much information shared … Blah, tough living in this day and age, isn’t it? The age of immediate consequences from something you may post online. The Internet is everywhere and immediate. Anyway, here are the current events:

Hosting: There have been several instances in the hosting area that have devastated me. One, I had a disk crash on a machine that I never thought the disk would crash. Like, I had it in my mind that that was a pristine machine and I didn’t have to worry about it. It’s where all my stuff was and where I could just ssh in or sit at its console and update code on the fly … No backups. Gone. Now I have everything important on RAID5 and my personal machines have Time Machine running.

Verizon is a huge thorn in my side. My last mile is Verizon. Verizon is copper. Verizon wants to run FIOS (fiber) in Philadelphia. Comcast rules the video market in Philadelphia. Seems contacting politicians is the only way Verizon FIOS will come to Philadelphia. There is nothing more than I want right now is FIOS to be in Philadelphia because my connection speed would greatly increase immediately. How this affects me now is that Verizon doesn’t want to run any new copper, they only want to run FIOS. I have had a terrible time as of late with my connection and this is the problem. It happened the first time in May and was dormant until Christmas Eve, from then on it was daily bouncing until the last copper pair change. Verizon has been on site over 3 times. It’s too late, the customers that this affected the worst have already found other solutions. Not cool Verizon, not cool at all.

Octane: Sound for Octane continues, but with almost every venue having house sound installed, I can’t rememer the last time I needed my PA. For that matter, the last time I had the PA in the trailer, the trailer was burglarized for one bass bin and one monitor. They took nothing else although much was in there as well as all the band’s gear that was strewn to just the outside of the trailer. Makes absolutely no sense. I still haven’t been able to sell the truck since replacing it with the van and trailer. I should try that on eBay again. While Octane remains booked fairly steady for a band in their position, there are weekend nights that I am sitting home.

Fosterchild: I have mixed Fosterchild a couple times since the lineup change and circumstances warranted it. It was a welcome change from the norm. Apparently we’re going on tour soon!

Out On the Town: I have started working with the paper again. This time I am doing the layout on the computer. Another reason for my Mac purchase. (Still steamed about that one [previous entry], but I will survive. I have rationalized some things away.) Hopefully this will help with the ultimate goal of sitting on my ass the rest of my life.

Windows: I found out that MS Access doesn’t scale, or self sustain. Don’t know how to put it, but left to its devices, a web site utilizing an MS Access database will cause ASP to hang on a Windows Server. The database needs to be regularly reorganized. I can tell you for a fact that this will not happen on any other platform. Thanks again Windows! Way to mess up everyone’s life on your server cause you can’t handle something and don’t report on it either.

Health: My health is getting better. I had my last cigarette September 27th, 2008 at 10:45pm. This was right before Octane’s first set (acoustic) outside at The Whiskey Tango. During the set, pressure mounted in the center of me chest and by the end of the set I was getting sharp pains. I didn’t go out for a smoke after the set, I took it easy but sharp pains came and went and I generally didn’t feel right. I was getting scared and I decided that I thought I should go to the hospital. I spent the weekend in the hospital while they did all sorts of fun tests. All tests were okay. I then went back to have a camera shoved down my throat and that turned up acid damage in my esophagus, stomach and duodenum. I was told to take 4 Prilosec daily. The anesthetic for the tube test was wild, like snapping your fingers, test done and two and a half hours went by. I haven’t smoked since and have started dieting and exercising. I may get a Brazilian and wear a bikini or thong to the beach this summer? … and everyone knows how I love the beach.

The Whiskey Tango: I went back to work at The Whiskey Tango May 20th 2008 to fill in the open nights with Octane and to do the off nights. Ronnie quit to go work for Spellcaster down the shore for the summer with more nights. Since then The Whiskey Tango changed ownership and management and those off nights aren’t happening anymore. Status there is up in the air right now.

Coding: I recently updated some old ASP pages I did way back in the day for the Bigg Romeo site. That was fun. I am progressing on new web development projects and I am very excited about that. Also thinking of ways to further promote the hosting through a better interface. The new trickles in slowly anymore and Verizon isn’t helping with the departed. Here’s hoping FIOS comes through. They are sure to support that endeavor more than they’ve helped me now, right?

OH! and the biggest thing about all of this is that anything new will be in a new location! All the servers, routers, switches, computers, etc. will be moved to a brand new location. We will be moving but still don’t know when yet. I am hoping for A.S.A.P., but that’s me.

That’s all I can think of right now. Any questions?

Apple, on its way to crap.

Of course it’s only my opinion, but to me, that’s all that matters. Self centered? Maybe. But I think I am the person to determine what I find acceptable to me. What follows is my short assessment of what I have observed in the recent months about the cute company called Apple.

An eon ago, I bought the lamp shaped iMac. At the time I was interested in any and all operating systems and alternatives to Microsoft at all costs. I found the iMac on eBay for $1200. I found no use for the machine other than using it to logon to chat networks and utilize the machine that way. I didn’t like the way the text editors worked in that their keystrokes were completely foreign to what I am familiar. All that aside, I didn’t use it all that much. One day, the hard drive was gone – I replaced it with an IDE drive I had and got the machine working again. Had to use those “star” tools to get in there and such, but I was able to get everything working as it should. Sorry for this tangent, but I wanted to explain that I am not new to Apple, I just tried it out and didn’t get “into it” at the time.

I don’t know how, but over the course of time I became more and more accepting of the Mac and was getting used to seeing many of the examples of the things I was getting into done on the Mac. Mostly web development and programming stuff. I also do graphics and video stuff, and the Mac is heavily used there as well. YouTube came popular and the Mac became popular on there as well as many people started making their movies obviously on a Mac. So I decided to give it another try with the latest and greatest Macs.

I was shopping a particular web job and I was thinking of getting back into the publishing of a local paper here in Philly and I thought that I should move toward the Mac. I especially liked some text editors that were now available for the Mac so I researched it up and decided on the Black Mac. It had everything I thought would be satisfactory when it came to development, portability and enjoyment from one machine.

So I start tweaking out the machine and then I determine that the built in iSight camera makes an 8k whistle while recording a video. The microphone itself is fine after testing in GarageBand, just in iMovie when making a movie and it is determined that the auto brightness of the camera affects the squeal. I made a movie about it and posted it on YouTube. For me this is a deal breaker as I had planned to use the machine to make videos for YouTube. I haven’t yet, but I am leaving the option open. I had noticed this squeal/whistle on YouTube members videos, but thought it was something that they must have done to cause it. Either leaving the speakers on while recording or some such option that they wouldn’t have noticed that I surely would have. No, it’s just a faulty piece of hardware, so I took it back and complained.

I first called Apple and went through their tech support. That took a long time and eventually I went to level 2 support. While it wasn’t resolved, I figured it was the problem and made the YouTube video and from the responses in forums et al., it didn’t seem there was any relief. Because of other issues, I decided to return the Black Mac and get a McBook Pro. The tech support guy from Apple was supposed to call me on Thursday (what the wait was, I don’t know) and mentioning Thursday to you without telling what day it was that I called doesn’t matter, cause Thursday is as arbitrary a day as there is from whatever day I was calling originally. It has never been resolved.

So after calling ahead to the Apple store, they said they had in stock the MacBook Pro 17″ with the high res screen upgrade. While this is the case, it was not. The high res screen upgrade was $100 on the web site. The one the Apple Store had in stock was the one with the upgraded screen, hard drive and CPU making it the most expensive iMac sold (and I venture to say EVER sold) but they’re much cheaper now and you get more. I wanted to up to 4G RAM, but I would have to pick up the machine the next day. I obviously wanted to leave with the thing. I also got the Apple Care, an extra keyboard and mouse (both wired) for when I put the big screen dual monitor setup into play. That works out well by the way.

So, this was two trips ever in my life to the Apple store. First time to purchase the Black MacBook and second time to return it and upgrade to the MacBook Pro. Both times I hooked up quickly with someone and was taken care of, it seemed like a normal store-like experience although an Apple store is nothing normal. They waived the “restocking fee” on the Black Mac due to the faulty camera whistle squeal thing. A defective MacBook. It took a while for me to convince the “expert” that there was in fact an 8k whistle (I RTA’d it).

The MacBook Pro has performed as a champ. Lots of nifty features to it and it’s blazing fast. The screen is incredible. Using split screen works wonderfully. I’ve developed several web sites on it as well as produced the publication on it twice thus far. My only complaint as of this date is the lack of keys. There are many keys I would like to use for when I am SSH’d into a machine where use of the F keys would be nice without having to alter my MacBook Pro keys but I have had to do that. The Page Up/Down situation where most times the Fn option works, but many times it does not and some files online tend to be a bit large so it’s a time waster. So that’s it really, is the keys … they could have added another row or something I think. I think it would make a lot of people happy.

Okay, maybe I have more than one complaint. My second complaint is my biggest. About a month later, all the Macs were upgraded. Doesn’t matter that I spent all this money on this particular machine. It’s past 14 days. Sorry. The new MacBook Pro comes with 4G of RAM now. Sigh. To me, it’s bullshit that I wasnt’ notified that this was the case before I spent this much money on something. I can’t even sell it to buy the new one as people can get the new one themselves. I would feel guilty duping someone. I can’t believe Apple doesn’t give a crap that they basically ripped me off. Thank you, please give us more money.

Money aside, I was happy with the nifty bells and whistles that Apple has with their ease of use and their commercials, etc., and was into the iPhone and couldn’t wait until I could renew my contract to get one. That’s 18 months between AT&T renewals. I was getting farther and farther awat from Microsoft and their horrible ways, their monopoly and their power over me to use particular hardware and software to accomplish various things. Blah!

So boom! I get the iPhone and immediately after another iPhone user checks it out he says the Home button is messed up. So I check it out and mess with it and once again, who wants to take something back that they just got. I try to justify that it works fine for me even though once and a while it doesn’t work. Maybe it needs to be worn in? More rationalization. Reality; it’s not working properly, return it. I take the iPhone back to AT&T the very next day. After signing in and waiting, AT&T will swap it but I will have to pay a 10% restocking fee. (On a defective iPhone that I got 24 hours ago). So instead of paying that, I drove to the Apple store to save the 10% restocking fee. On the way over, I used the iPhone to call Apple and verify that AT&T couldn’t swap my phone and that the Apple store wouldn’t have a problem. Yeah, they would take care of it. AT&T doesn’t hold as high a standard in excellence or some crap like that was why it was explained that I would have had to pay a restocking fee with AT&T.

I get to the Apple store and I don’t have a “reservation” so I am going to go “standby” to wait for a “technician” … Uhm, what? My phone broke – give me new one – I say bye bye. Nope. Not even close. I stood there for over an hour. Yeah, I browsed a little bit first, but for being such a huge store, there isn’t a lot there. Remeber I told you it was a weird store? Let me explain.

In an Apple Store, there’s nothing higher than your waist. The entire store is tables. You can see corner to corner nothing blocking your view in the entire store. There is merchandise hanging on the walls closer to the back wall which is lined with their customer service-ish type counter. There is a table with iMacs on it where kids can mess with them. You sit on rubber balls if you’re so inclined. And the tables further towards the back have shelves with the keyboards and mice on them.

The counter is where I paid for both MacBooks and where I stood to finally talk to Eric about my iPhone. I had already decided while waiting that I wasn’t going to buy an accessory for the iPhone. I was upset with this incredible wait. I even had a guy come up to me and ask if I needed help and I said that the girl took my name, etc. and he said oh, okay. So, he had nothing to do, but I was still standing there. At one point, there was about 6 Apple employees standing in and around the iMac that they used to “book” people and some were just BSing and another was texting on his iPhone (I bet his Home button worked). That sort of broke up after some time, then I saw the girl who took my name leave with her coat on taking her break.

Finally the overly happy “concierge” as they call them, said that Eric would be happy to deal with me. Eric said that my Home button problem wasn’t as I described “defective”. I told him that anyone who held my iPhone agreed it was defective and every iPhone in the AT&T store and the Apple Store responded differently than the iPhone that I got yesterday. He said that may be the case, but the button worked. And I said not all the time. And he said that it wasn’t broken, that he could have a technician look at it. I said what is a tech gonna do? It’s defective and gave some examples about broken things and he finally gave in to granting my request for a replacement. It was far too much work, effort and emotion to reach the desired result that in my opinion was obvious.

So why my title to this anecdote? I stood in that Apple store watching the activity going on and had much time to think and observe. I saw many people come and go with problems. I saw people being schooled about using Macs, one an elderly woman. I don’t know, is that free? Maybe, or maybe you can purchase courses via their website? I don’t know, I wasn’t looking for a course. Anyway, I started hearing the silly problems. Then the trivial. I started thinking that more and more people are going to be buying the Macs due to the nifty bells and whistles and the commercials. Where Macs for the most part have been the choice of developers and high end graphics people, now elderly women are “learning” how to use Macs and the general population as whole are starting to buy Macs. They’re told that they’re much simpler, etc., but the fact remains that the gen pop as a whole ain’ta so smart when it comes to these technical thingamabobs. There will be more of the silly and trivial problems.

Then, with my problem is the quality. Eric kept telling me that the Home button worked and that there was no “spec” for it being deemed defective or not. I was like “spec?” are you kidding me. It’s not a spec, it’s obviously defective. Touch every iPhone in use on the planet and then touch mine. I’m sorry, I didn’t know when I bought it cause I never had one before and I wasn’t familiar enough about the Home button to know the difference. Now I’m a Home button expert. But the other ssues is that it’s proprietary. What’s plastic may be cool cause it’s all Apple baby, but it’s plastic and it does break. You can’t go to CircuitCity or Best Buy and fix it up, you have to go to Apple or you have to ship to Apple. What to do if there’s no “spec” on whether your Apple hardware is defective or not? Well, if Eric had his way and I would have accepted his answer, I would have been out a lot of money, again.

They got me on the MacBook Pro and they almost got me on the iPhone. How many people don’t put up a fight or know enough to know that they’re in the right? Having more and more people show up to Apple’s stores and not taking them in a list order or something or having a better mechanism to address people is going to seriously crush them. It’s soured me big time. If anyone knows anything about retail, you make the problems go away first. What would have happened if I had started to share my own opinion with those other Apple customers? What if I were to go down home negative and start pointing out the obvious? When that little ol’ lady says she’s just trying it out to see if she can do some things on the computer, maybe I can chime in that she could save a substantial amount of money if she went to Best Buy. Old people like saving money.

Finally, YES! This is just my opinion. These are certainly things I feel strongly about, but these are things I choose to live with … Because my result is favorable, I can rationalize and accept certain things, but the more the same thing happens, the more that I think that I might think differently in the future. Here’s hoping that Apple can change for the better and not keep screwing people like me.

Flash for FreeBSD

I don’t know how old this is, but there’s a petition for getting Adobe to write a version of Flash for FreeBSD. Sign the petition if you’re into it. I’m #4000.

It’s more than a mail server

So, I attempted to upgrade my mail server … it didn’t work …

Actually, it started out as an idea for me to start another mail server from scratch … I wanted to create a test email server so I could learn more about all the interaction that goes on … As I was researching this, I determined from my reading that it would probably be very simple to upgrade the existing mail server … You know, the one that’s serving thousands of actively live email addresses, whether email is stored on the server or forwarded … I have upgraded plenty of servers in place and have never had major issue … This changed yesterday …

Normally what I’m upgrading is PHP … They update PHP on a pretty regular basis, and it ain’t no thing to cvsup to the latest ports and deinstall, reinstall to the latest and greatest … but with the mail server, this is a bit different … there are many dependencies … I can usually handle this very well too … I can backtrack failures or Google errors and find a fix …

Up until yesterday, I have always paid a consultant to work on my mail server … Email is not something to take lightly … It is the most exploited thing on the Internet … Too much SPAM and Viruses to think that I could handle all of this on my own … So for years now, I have had someone else do the thinking and I do the tinkering … Because of all the tinkering I’ve done myself, and I’m pretty proud of myself that I setup authoritative name servers and an inline firewall all doing multiple amounts of graphing, etc … I thought that I was at the point where I could handle the email server on my own …

All that seemed to be required was that I bring the ports tree up to current and then compile the new programs … Since this was something I wasn’t familiar with, I figured I would let portupgrade have at it and upgrade all the ports that needed upgrading … That’s why it had sounded so easy to me … I also figured I had all the time in the world to do this as the active system would remain active until I rehashed and restarted the services … Not the case …

First thing to fail, the MySQL server … When it’s portupgraded, it stops the MySQL server … So that was the first problem that immediately ceased mail flow … I started the “new” MySQL server and all seemed well … but then things just degredated from there … Now it was a race to compile the programs and get everything in sync once again … The phone kept ringing, but I didn’t have immediate answers … I wanted to try to fix it before I talked to anyone … One hour became two … Then two became four … I didn’t have much sleep, so I was purty tired …

Once I got to the point that everything was finished compiling, out of the hundreds of ports that were checked and upgraded, there were three that didn’t make it … cronolog, fastest_cvsup and maildrop … Two of those stopped the operation of webmail as well as normal mail flow … cronolog stopped apache from operating and maildrop, well, it’s a mail server so something called maildrop was probably pretty important, eh? So I attempted to deinstall, reinstall those programs … When they didn’t work (and maildrop took some time to fail) I Googled to find answers … Those answers were not readily found … I suppose in retrospect, it’s because maildrop is probably not as popular as PHP or apache …

So, I am dead in the water … I could continue to tinker my way through and make it work, but there was two things going against me … The major one, there was a bunch of people that wanted their email … After all it was a Monday, and Monday is the most important (busiest) day … Man, when I screw something up, I do it right! The second thing was, no matter how I got it working, I would not feel confident that it was done right … That’s the most important thing to me … Again, email is something that I don’t think should be messed with or taken lightly …

I resort to turning my mess over to the consultant … Now normally I book time with him … We schedule a time and I open up the firewall, etc and we get it done … Him proceeding with the necessary steps and me babysitting in case he needs to restart the machine or something goes goofy … There’s been only one time that I can recall that I actually had to help him … Most things just worked when he did them … Anyway, by the time he straightened out what I had brought the mail server to, it cost me $200.00 … I figure it probably cost me more due to the fact that people couldn’t get their email … but it’s working now, and that’s all that matters I guess …

The problem is that I don’t understand the mail server … There are many programs working in concert to facilitate the flow of mail and in that process weed out the bad mail and forward the good … The good thing is that I understand the mail server more after this experience … Where I left all of the thinking to the consultant and Mr. Bernstein, knowing the steps in which to rectify the situation I have a better understanding of what’s going on … The other problem is that the mail server isn’t just a mail server … It’s a web server, and imap server, pop, smtp, etc and a bunch of applications talking to one another again, to facilitate the flow of what is to be determined as good email …

This brings me back to the beginning … I am going to set up a parallel mail server … One that I can break and not affect the masses that depend on the mail server … In doing this, I will be able to learn more about all of those applications that work together to stop the bad people on the Internet … There are many ways to do this, and I would like to get more of them in place … The more I can do on my own to figure out how to make it work, the better off I will be in providing this for other people as I will actually know what’s going on … That is becoming more important to me as the cost of running the mail server starts to hit my wallet more … While it’s all Open Source programs, they’re getting much more sophisticated since the baddies are getting that much more sophisticated … I don’t want SPAM … I want to stop it … I could certainly pay someone to make that happen, but that goes beyond the scope of a working mail server … That goes into to custom stuff, and that’s what I want to pursue …

If you’re someone that relies on my mail server for mail, sorry about yesterday (Monday, September 18th) … I had nothing but good intentions in bring the mail server up to date on the applications processing the mail … portaudit was informing me of application that contained vulnerabilites, and I wanted to get them fixed … I just didn’t want to spend the money for a simple portupgrade … Well, now I know that all things that may seem simple aren’t always so simple …

This goes back to things I have said in the past, and they certainly ring true by this example … It may be very easy to set something up … There are many people out there setting up hosting servers that are all encompassing and selling cheap hosting on them … $1/mo., etc … They’re very easy to put in place, either by paying someone to do it or by using a basic understanding of server setups … Where the important stuff comes in is in the ability to maintain that server/application … Vulnerabilities pop up all the time … Microsoft and Apple have facilitated an automatic update feature to solve this … Every once in a while, my iMac tells me, “Hey, you need to update this piece of software!” and I do it … The Microsoft guys, I manually check on a regular basis, sooner if I know something is up, and that’s due to having one machine that still checks and informs me if there’s something going on …

So, I want to get to know my mail server since I have been working on a control panel of sorts that is keeping track of many things for me … The more I update it, the more things are revealed that I was unaware of … This is just things that people were able to get out of me for free since I wasn’t paying very close attention … The more I got this working, the better handle I got on things, and with the mail server also keeping a database, I want to tap into that and merge that into the control panel … If something can be queried, it can be updated and eventually I will be able to get my application running the entire network … I work on this as time allows … The more and more I work on it, the more and more I get to a hands off solution … But I digress …

Back to School

Well yeah, I haven’t posted in a while … Sometimes I would think about when something in particular came up that I thought would be a neat topic to discuss, but I just didn’t get a round tuit … I think I used to have one, but I don’t remember where it is … and yes, by my standards, I have been busy …

The vLog … I have been creating vLogs for the OctaneCrew site … Got into this when monitor guy Alex started it, and I thought it was a much better way to share thoughts than typing up a storm such as I’m doing now … Then light guy Dave made a vLog of which he’s the video guy and he set our standards much higher … I have got into some pretty interesting video editing …

Octane has been working and working and we just came off a fun weekend … They played 3 all original shows … Friday they opened for Staind, Three Days Grace and Soil at The Electric Factory … Sunday they opened for Three Days Grace and Blackstone Cherry at House of Blues in Atlantic City … Saturday was an extended set at The Grape Street Pub in Manayunk … I guess in all instances I was on some pretty neat boards … Staind travels with the PM5D and HOB has a 5K … Grape Street has an A&H ML something or other … HOB sounded awesome …

Have been watching Eagles preseason … They look good … I remain, as always, optimistic and I will leave it at that …

Saw the season premeire of House last night … Still a good TV show so let’s see where they take it this year … Lost starts October 4th …

October 5th is the date I am supposed to be able to renegotiate my T1 contract and you can bet your booty that I will be on the phone first thing in the AM … I have been paying a T1 cost that is outrageous and was locked in three years ago … They would not renegotiate the contract until this one was up … I am in the process of determining if whether since they did this to me that I ought to switch providers … My opinion was that since the price dropped a couple hundred dollars per month that they should have renegotiated me at that time … Instead they told me that I had to wait and there was no recourse but to pay the contracted amount whether I stayed with them or not … Meaning, I could drop them at anytime, but I still owed them the contracted monthly payment … Funny thing is, one of the prices I got about 8 months ago was from them so I attached that email and sent it to my account representative saying that those two should talk … They stuck to their guns and continued to extort the additional money from me …

I cleaned up my hosting database substantially … All the domains that I no longer hosted I removed from my database … All the billing history, all the customers that no longer existed … While I tried to collect from them, it never happened so I decided to strike it up as a loss and to concentrate on those people that are part of the program and do pay as scheduled etc … I wrote a bunch of code in the last week to straighten out my DNS according to my domain database and removed all the discrepancies and found some things that were not right … Sometimes people get things by me, and this code stops that easily by painting a very clear picture of what’s going on … I need to expand this into email and actual disk residences, but DNS is certainly going to stop the traffic …

To sum up those last two paragraphs, with the T1 pricing and the coming and going of hosting customers, hopefully this will once again even out … I have been paying a lot of money to keep a connection active that isn’t necessarily supporting itself … For whatever reason, those people utilizing the service have chosen to stop what they’re doing or go elsewhere and I don’t claim to know exactly why … I can only assume … First, I can assume that someone else is cheaper … I have tried a 1&1 site for a little while … I have even started moving my domain registrations to another registrar … The second thing I could think of is service and where I try to be awesome in service, there are those times that my SmartJack got wet or I have had things such as my DNS server crashing … All interruptions were fixed as soon as possible, but for the 1 year uptime, that 1 hour makes all the difference … So what you were up 8,760 hours, that one hour was when I *really* needed my email … I changed the DNS servers at 1&1 and am pointing everything to me … I didn’t like 1&1’s interface etc, and I don’t like their junk mail … Back to the original reason I started hosting, to be able to do things my way …

Anyway … that’s an update on what I’ve been up to, maybe I will be able to get back to posting here regularly? That would be special …

Power Supply fries in Windows Server

I am awake now because a power supply failed in a Windows server. I should be sleeping now preparing for my weekend, but these things take priority. My wife woke me up when she said there must be something wrong with the computers because several people were calling … Sho’nuff, I see that Mr. Windows 157 isn’t responding to requests … The green power light is glowing, but the fan ain’t blowing … (Johnny Cochran I’m not) … I try to power off from the rear and power it up … Nothing … If the fan were bad, but not the supply, I could have replaced it at a later time … Anyway, slide that puppy out of the rack and spinning screws to put in a replacement power supply … Booted up, and it seemed to me to be slow to get to the BIOS banner, but who knows, I was across the room when it powered on and things work weird through the KVM … So, I will definitely have to cycle it after a boot … Since I am going to have to cycle it, I put on the current available maintenance if any exists … Just so happens there is, so I put this on all other Windows servers … Cycled and all is well …

What really stinks about this? I was sitting here all night running side by side ‘net installs of SuSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 … I had all this down time of waiting where if I had known that server wasn’t responding I could have had the supply replaced well before morning prime time … C’est la vie … I am going back to sleep … Long sleepless weekend ahead …

Thunderbird 1.5

Thunderbird 1.5 I didn’t know it, but a new version of Thunderbird came out … With the new version of Firefox, it does version checking so you know when a new release is available, and you have the option to download and install it immediately … I imagine they have done the same implementation with Thunderbird …

I also got a little creative and tried some themes for Thunderbird and I’ve settled on one called CrossOver 2.2 … It is an Aqua type theme and it is a little more intuitive in its colors than the default Thunderbird theme …

The screen shot I posted here is enough to show you the layout of the screen and the effect that the Aqua type theme has on Thunderbird’s display … It’s also small enough that you can’t make out what it says on the screen without me having to go in there and edit away my email addresses and messages … In addition to this theme, I’ve changed the theme of my desktop to make the window borders small … I don’t like too much screen real estate being taken up by wasted space …

The Crossover 2.2 icons are a bit more intuitive … I now understand what a few of them mean (like if an account is using POP-SSL), and the highlighting is done by color rather than just by boldface … Also viewing messages changes the colors of the quotes and different colors for multi-level quotes …

I don’t know that any of this would simply be possible by going into Thunderbird as it comes and make changes, but just popping in this theme made changes that I’m happy with, so I’ll stick with it … Hopefully you will have desireable results as well …

I can’t stress enough the amazing response I get using Firefox and Thunderbird for my Internet experience … That’s the reason I have links to them on my page here … If you use the Internet as much as I do, these are required for your usage and protection …

With coding comes satisfaction

I’ve been coding an update to a web application I developed in mid 2001. I originally wrote it in ASP and since I’ve scrapped that proprietary language for the more versatile PHP, this is the direction I’ve taken … Along the way, cleaning up the code is happening as well as adding more features to the application … I’ve already implemented a completely new user authentication system … While working on this code as a whole, other things have come up that required me to implement them into other projects, so I go off on tangents a bit … The overhead flourescent got turned off and I’m back in reflected off the ceiling incandescent bliss … My kids and wife came to the dungeon and asked why I had shut the light out … Each one of them individually … I told them that I didn’t shut the lights out, just switched which lights were on …

Anyway, I have already begun using the application although not finished … Handling receiving of payments has been completely rewritten so it is much easier on me … This is normally what held up the completion of each month’s cycle in the past … Due to this update, that should not ever be an issue again … I also merged the application … Whereas I used to log into a system separately and let the registered users into their own version of the code, I am merging the purposes of the files to serve those privileged and those that are not … I am also asking for input from the wife as I hope she can start to get into doing things on the computer rather than the occasional lookup on the web for driving directions or something … Would like to get her into full fledged email and computer understanding …

Finally what will happen is that I will write system level scripts to be run automatically by the computers … This way things that need to be run at a certain time or date will happen … I will also add the running of these scripts to run more often and I will start bugging people more often than I have in the past … This should help me in many ways … Along with those scripts revolving around this application to be run on a scheduled basis, I will also have the scripts within the application leave breadcrumbs around for other scripts that will be run on a schedule act according to those breadcrumbs … This should take a bunch of administration out of my hands and automate it for me … I should have done this a long time ago … How crazy I get with it has yet to be determined … I don’t know what snags lay before me …