One or more of the recent updates for Windows 10 rendered my laptop incapable of communicating with the outside world. The Windows Firewall failed to run due to Base Filtering Engine not being able to run either. It’s the dreaded “Error 5: Access denied” error message all over again. Windows 10 also thought it was not activated, which is plain wrong. And no, I haven’t changed any hardware, save upgrading the wireless NIC in May last year. Running sfc /scannow with elevated privileges found nothing wrong. Restoring the system to the state prior to the latest updates made the network and firewall subsystems running again. All is well. What a mess.
All posts by Trond Endrestøl
Voyager 1 on 2027-12-26T23:59:36,9+0000
I downloaded a new version of NASA’s Eyes from https://eyes.nasa.gov/. The old version was unable to upgrade itself for some reason.
I ran a simulation on Voyager 1 towards the end of its life. At 2027-12-26T23:59:36,9+0000, the spacecraft changed its attitude, pointing the high gain antenna towards outer space. I checked the Wikipedia article, but found no description. Maybe the change in attitude is an artifact of NASA’s Eyes.
Does anyone know what the final act of Voyager 1 will be, save running out of electrical energy?
Office 365 and error 30125-28 (404)
The Office 365 instance installed on a student’s laptop showed signs of not being activated and in need of an update. Clicking on any of the small buttons below the ribbon made no difference. Running Office updates manually from “File → Account → Update” gave us an error message: 30125-28 (404).
Running sfc /scannow with elevated rights managed to repair enough of the corruption to allow Office 365 to continue working.
Why are modern “cloud” software so fragile? Why are Dropbox and Google Drive far superior to the equivalent of Microsoft? Why is OneDrive for Business more on the order of OneDrive from Hell?
pf(4) as a NAT44 router
pf(4) is a bit optimistic with regard to how many states it can track using the defaults.
[zone: pf states] PF states limit reached
Raising the hard limits to four times the default seems better:
set limit {
states 40000,
src-nodes 40000,
frags 20000,
table-entries 800000
}
Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series
Cisco’s Catalyst 9400 Series introduced this summer do look promising, but it’s still missing a few highlights:
- Complete support for redundant supervisors; unavailable according to the release notes dated July 31, 2017
The supervisor module (hardware) supports redundancy, but the software does not. The associated route processor redundancy (RPR) and stateful switchover (SSO) features are also currently not supported. Redundacy[sic] in software will be supported in a later release.
- Multigigabit line card
- SFP+ line card, and possibly
- QSFP/QSFP+ line cards
- Visio stencils for chassis, power supplies, supervisor, and line cards
The release notes and data sheets are unclear on the supervisor’s ability to perform as a mobility agent.
So far the Catalyst 4500E Series seems more developed than the new Catalyst 9400 Series.
Upgrading PHP from 7.0.22 to 7.1.9
I created a shell script which began its simple life as
#!/bin/sh
# Use on first run
FLAGS=-ncfpvo
# Use on subsequent runs
#FLAGS=-fpvo
portupgrade ${FLAGS} lang/php71 lang/php70 || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-ctype textproc/php70-ctype || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} ftp/php71-curl ftp/php70-curl || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-dom textproc/php70-dom || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} graphics/php71-gd graphics/php70-gd || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} devel/php71-gettext devel/php70-gettext || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} security/php71-hash security/php70-hash || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} converters/php71-iconv converters/php70-iconv || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} devel/php71-json devel/php70-json || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} net/php71-ldap net/php70-ldap || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} converters/php71-mbstring converters/php70-mbstring || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} security/php71-mcrypt security/php70-mcrypt || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-memcache databases/php70-memcache || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} www/php71-opcache www/php70-opcache || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} security/php71-openssl security/php70-openssl || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-pdo databases/php70-pdo || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-pdo_pgsql databases/php70-pdo_pgsql || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-pgsql databases/php70-pgsql || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} www/php71-session www/php70-session || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-simplexml textproc/php70-simplexml || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} net/php71-soap net/php70-soap || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} net/php71-sockets net/php70-sockets || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-sqlite3 databases/php70-sqlite3 || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-wddx textproc/php70-wddx || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-xml textproc/php70-xml || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} archivers/php71-zlib archivers/php70-zlib || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} www/mod_php71 www/mod_php70 || exit
After running the script for a second time and a third time, etc, the script was successively changed to:
#!/bin/sh
# Use on first run
#FLAGS=-ncfpvo
# Use on subsequent runs
FLAGS=-fpvo
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} lang/php71 lang/php70 || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-ctype textproc/php70-ctype || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} ftp/php71-curl ftp/php70-curl || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-dom textproc/php70-dom || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} graphics/php71-gd graphics/php70-gd || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} devel/php71-gettext devel/php70-gettext || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} security/php71-hash security/php70-hash || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} converters/php71-iconv converters/php70-iconv || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} devel/php71-json devel/php70-json || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} net/php71-ldap net/php70-ldap || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} converters/php71-mbstring converters/php70-mbstring || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} security/php71-mcrypt security/php70-mcrypt || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} www/php71-session www/php70-session || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} archivers/php71-zlib archivers/php70-zlib || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-memcache databases/php70-memcache || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} www/php71-opcache www/php70-opcache || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} security/php71-openssl security/php70-openssl || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-pdo databases/php70-pdo || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-pdo_pgsql databases/php70-pdo_pgsql || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-pgsql databases/php70-pgsql || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-simplexml textproc/php70-simplexml || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} net/php71-soap net/php70-soap || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} net/php71-sockets net/php70-sockets || exit
#portupgrade ${FLAGS} databases/php71-sqlite3 databases/php70-sqlite3 || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-xml textproc/php70-xml || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} textproc/php71-wddx textproc/php70-wddx || exit
portupgrade ${FLAGS} www/mod_php71 www/mod_php70 || exit
Restart Apache using service apache24 restart.
In the end, PHP 7.0.22 got upgraded to PHP 7.1.9. All is well.
Revit 2018.1 and Licensing System Error 1
A student experienced Revit 2018.1 giving him this rather useless error message:
Licensing System Error 1
After Googling for a solution, we installed/repaired all the Visual C++ runtimes we could find in 3rdParty\x64\VCRedist and in 3rdParty\x86\VCRedist from the Revit 2018 distribution.
Success!
Shame on lazy developers not willing to code reasonable error messages explaning what the program attemped to do with what.
GNU style error messages is a lot better than nonsense words. E.g.:
sourcefile.c: lineno: open("/some/file") = -1, errno = 2 (No such file or directory)
Update 2017-09-05:
Today I had the opportunity to examine another case of “Licensing System Error 1”. This time I installed 3rdParty\x86\VCRedist\2005\vcredist_x86.exe only. As far as I can tell, Visual C++ 2005 Runtime x86 wasn’t installed at all prior to my actions.
Revit 2018.1 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Yesterday, a student installed Autodesk Revit 2018 on his Windows 10 x64 laptop. He then upgraded to Revit 2018.1. After entering the licensing details, Revit crashed. Installing the latest drivers from nVidia, currently at version 385.41, and rebooting the laptop saved us from any more grief.
Pässler PRTG 17.3.32.2478
I’ve been exploring Pässler PRTG on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 (Microsoft Imagine Premium) for the past couple of days. While the system is impressive and on the border of being overwhelming, it lacks complete IPv6 support.
The web interface is IPv4 only, and the NetFlow v9 collector only understands IPv4. PRTG can do PING, SNMP, etc, over IPv6, but you can only specify whether PRTG should contact a device using IPv4 or IPv6, not both. For as long as our networks remain dual-stack it makes sense to explore both network protocols simultaneously, in the same manner we can do with Icinga and Nagios, i.e. specify IPv4 and IPv6 addresses where applicable. A workaround is to register a device twice, once for IPv4 and again for IPv6. Be careful not to create too many duplicate sensors.
I wish PRTG would ask me if I wanted to run autodiscovery after installing it. PRTG detected our core switch as the DHCP (relay) service, duplicating all the sensors it could find.
Neither SNMP nor PRTG are ZFS aware, and in many cases it’s utterly pointless to monitor a lot of ZFS filesystems. Instead we should monitor ZFS pools, if only that were possible.
SNMP doesn’t convey whether a filesystem is diskbased or not, so I had to remove sensors for mountpoints such as /dev, /dev/fd, /proc, /usr/compat/linux/proc, /var/Named/dev, etc.
Patch for math/py-matplotlib
Without this patch, python2.7 will crash when the loop in setup.py reaches setupext.BackendGtk3Cairo().
--- setup.py.orig 2016-09-09 04:50:50.000000000 +0200
+++ setup.py 2017-08-03 17:50:19.742905000 +0200
@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@
setupext.BackendQt5(),
setupext.BackendQt4(),
setupext.BackendGtk3Agg(),
- setupext.BackendGtk3Cairo(),
+ #setupext.BackendGtk3Cairo(),
setupext.BackendGtkAgg(),
setupext.BackendTkAgg(),
setupext.BackendWxAgg(),