Wed, 13 Jan 2010

Airport Extreme Shenanigans

I recently got my hands on an Airport Extreme from Apple. It's a nice little device to replace my old linksys. I was using my Soekris board to do that but something which speaks AFP natively is nice to have, especially now that I have 2 Apple machines in the house. Have no fear, my Soekris box will still be my border device, and will run a couple of key services too.

While configuring the Airport to replace my Linksys I was unable to find a way to set the internal IP address of the device. I can tell it to use NAT or just bridge at layer 2. If it is in NAT mode I can't tell it what to use for an internal IP address, at all. It defaults to 10.0.1.1, 192.168.1.1 or 172.something.1.1. This totally screws up my network, and AFAICT there is no way to change it, at least after spending 10 minutes looking through their administration stuff and online.

Back when I learned networking basics your default gateway lived at the top of the network address space, and I've always configured my networks to be like that. I understand that it doesn't have to be that way, but it's just the way I've rolled for as long as I can remember. At some point it apparently became fashionable to put your default route at the bottom. Seems kind of silly to me but whatever, as long as I can change it I don't care what the default is.

I had a machine at 192.168.1.1/24 already, which obviously was conflicting with my Airport Extreme. So now I have to re-configure that machine (I have a handful of static machines because they serve various things out to the public and changing firewall rules to match DHCP changes is annoying). To make matters worse every machine on my network that was static was using 192.168.1.254 as a DNS server, so every time I SSH'ed into a machine to re-configure it I had to wait for reverse DNS to timeout.

If Apple made it so you can not change the IP address of the airport extreme I would not be surprised. Apple products are great if you fit into their very narrow use-case. But the minute you try to do even basic things that are normal EVERYWHERE else in the world you end up fighting with Apple stuff. I can point to multiple instances of where Apple products are total failures. This Airport Extreme business is just one example.

posted at: 21:23 | tags: , | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 14 Apr 2009

Gnome requires Apache?

wxs@syn wxs % make -C /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 all-depends-list | grep apache
/usr/ports/www/apache22
wxs@syn wxs %

WTF? Who thought that including an entire webserver just to run a desktop system is a good idea?

posted at: 16:16 | tags: , | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 08 Apr 2009

Muscle Memory is a Good Thing (and why gratuitous UI changes are bad)

Muscle memory is a wonderful thing. I do things on my computers on a daily basis that I don't even think about doing. The movements are just ingrained into my muscles. Office 2007 has broken that (yes, I still use Windows for a bit of work). My muscles know that 'alt-e x' means "cut" but apparently that is no longer the case. I don't know why they decided to get rid of this, but it is very painful to me because I highlight a bunch of stuff I want to cut out and I hit 'alt-e x' and end up replacing the entire selection with the letter 'x.' It is annoying beyond belief.

Think how bad it would be if 'yy' in vi suddenly did something else. A LOT of people would have to change something which has been burned into their muscles for longer than I care to think about. If Microsoft suddenly changed 'alt-space n' to do something other than minimize I would likely flip out and call my friends who work there and scream until they put it back. Some of my muscle memory things for Windows actually go all the way back to my early DOS days! If 'alt-f x' does anything other than exit I'd go insane.

posted at: 19:00 | tags: , | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 24 Sep 2008

Full RSS Feeds Only, Please.

The whole point of RSS is so that I can aggregate all the sites I like in one place and not have to visit each separately. I simple fire up my RSS reader of choice and browse through the headlines looking for things of interest. What really makes me annoyed is when one of the stories is a couple of lines long with a "read more" link. Why do I have to click the link to go to your site to read the story? Can't you just provide it to me in full so that I can enjoy it in the context of my RSS reader?

Maybe it's an advertisement thing? Who knows? All I know is that having to click another link to get the rest of the story is pretty god damn stupid. This also goes for stories which cover multiple pages. This is the modern internet - an extra couple hundred K of text is not going to make me flip out. If you're doing it for advertisement reasons stop being _that_ guy and make money on a real product not advertisements.

posted at: 21:03 | tags: | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 22 Sep 2008

iTunes Rant (Part 1?)

I keep all my music on an machine running NFS. All the music is exported to any machine on my local network. I simply mount it, drag it into iTunes, wait a bit (iTunes sucks, but I have yet to find anything better for my needs) and then go about listening to my music. In this respect I use iTunes strictly as a media player - none of my music is actually stored on the machine running iTunes. This is how I want it because I've built up a decent collection of music and have it setup in a way that works well for me. That is, everything works well until you go about adding in Apple products.

I got an iPhone over the weekend. I figure they are not worth more than $200, so when they came down to that price I decided to wait a bit to shake out some bugs and then pick one up. It's a great little device for my needs and I'm quite pleased with it. I spent some time over the weekend cleaning up the tags on some of my music and syncing it to the phone. This process involved a couple of steps.

  1. Drag albums I want into iTunes.
  2. Fix up the ID3 tag.
  3. Sync music to iPhone.
  4. Remove music from iTunes so I can listen to something else.

This process worked fine - although time consuming because I haven't fixed all the tags yet (it's been on my TODO list for a long time now). So tonight I go to plug my phone into my laptop to charge it and iTunes decided to erase all the music from my phone and replace it with what was currently in iTunes at the time. It has also done this to the iPod Shuffle I use when climbing.

I know there is a "sync music" checkbox in iTunes but I didn't realize that meant "auto-sync music." What really gets under my skin is the fact that iTunes is trying to be everything to everybody. What is wrong with an application that does nothing until I specifically tell it to do something. What if all I wanted to do was charge my phone, not sync music to it?

Apple products are great if you fall within that range of people that they are designed for. If you fall outside of that range you spend a lot of time fighting with the application to get it to behave how you want. This is the exact opposite of Apple's claim to fame ("It Just Works" is what all the fanboys tell me). For me it doesn't "Just Work" because it assumes I fit in their pre-conceived notion of how to use their software.

Needless to say I have since un-checked the "sync music" checkbox and must now remember to consistently check it, sync my music, then un-check it. In case anyone at Apple reads this: I hate you and hope you get mauled by a rabid lemur.

posted at: 22:03 | tags: , | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 29 Feb 2008

Flickr Sucks.

My flickr account expired recently and I wanted to renew it. I tried a few weeks ago and it didn't work. I tried again today thinking it was a transient problem on their end. Turns out it's still not letting me renew my account. Their error message is worthless and their help is equally as worthless. Maybe one of my friends at Yahoo! will see this and tell me what I'm doing wrong. All I'm trying to do is pay with either my credit card or paypal.

Sorry, there is a problem with this payment method. Click here to use another payment method or edit your payment information to proceed in purchasing this service. (4) Please see http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ordering for further information. If you are using PayPal as a payment method for this service, please review your PayPal information to make sure it is accurate and that the funding source associated with your PayPal account is valid and has sufficient funds for this purchase.

I just looked at my bank account and I have at least 3 purchases from Flickr for this. Seriously, what a POS service they provide.

UPDATE: Turns out they keep my address on file (gee, thanks Yahoo!) and it didn't match the one my bank has. Now I need to update my address with Yahoo! every time I move? Tell me again why they need my address and why they are submitting it to my bank? Is it too hard to give me a useful error message when something wrong happens? Now I need to keep an eye on my bank account and make sure the charges are properly dropped.

posted at: 10:34 | tags: , , | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 27 Jul 2007

Dear RIT ITS Department: Go away. Love, WXS

So RIT (where this machine is hosted) feels the need to try a series of different scans against various machines (I don't know how many they are scanning but I do see their failed SSH logins constantly) and it's quite annoying. I figured I have a few options for this:

  1. Do nothing and deal with (by skipping over in my logs) the attempts showing up in my logs.
  2. grep them out of my periodic log reports.
  3. Email abuse@rit.edu about RIT abusing my machine.
  4. Modify the login message to tell them to go away.
  5. Modify login to accept whatever password they give and watch what happens after (honeypot).
  6. Outright drop all connections from their scanning box.

I had been doing #1 for awhile now and it's become more annoying than anything else. Solution #2 is acceptable but comes without actually fixing the problem - it's really just an automated way of ignoring it. Solution #3 would be funny as hell but then I would have to deal with follow-up with it and quite frankly I'd rather not have to deal with RIT anymore than I have to. Solution #4 is more effort points than I want to spend. Solution #5 is just an extension of solution #4 but opens me up to attacks in the event that someone else tries the "authtest" user. So I went with solution #6.

I've never had to run a firewall on this machine because I keep my services pretty locked down and pay attention to things with both my box and exploits in the wild. I'm not saying I'm completely secure (I know I'm not) but I am saying that I liked the fact that I never had to turn on pf (or any of the other firewall choices in FreeBSD). It's for this reason that I'm going with a permit by default and deny by exception ruleset. It flies in the face of common sense when running a firewall but I'm accepting that since my main goal is to only drop those which are annoying me not secure my machine. Frankly, I'm OK with an accept by default and deny by exception ruleset in this case.

Maybe one of my handful of friends at ITS will read this and remove my machine from their scan list - if you drop drop me an email (wxs@atarininja.org).

posted at: 10:01 | tags: | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 22 May 2007

15 Minutes - WHY?

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>ipconfig /registerdns

Windows IP Configuration

Registration of the DNS resource records for all adapters of this computer has
been initiated. Any errors will be reported in the Event Viewer in 15 minutes..

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>

I was playing around a week or so ago on a Windows box and got the above information. Why does it take 15 minutes to tell me of any problems registering the resource records for all adapters of the computer? I'm glad I don't deal with Windows much anymore.

posted at: 10:41 | tags: , | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 25 Apr 2007

As if the Stupid Woman was Actually Important?

Thanks CNN! You always cover the most important news. There are a billion and one things screwed up in the world and CNN feels the need to tell us this as if it was highly important.

Luckily I still have NPR to tell me the real news, because CNN and other mass media outlets are worthless.

posted at: 10:22 | tags: | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 13 Mar 2007

Further Evidence Why Bugtraq Sucks.

Further evidence why Bugtraq is no longer a useful source of information regarding vulnerabilities and productive discussions thereof: Exhibit A. Honestly, do the moderator(s) of Bugtraq even read things and apply some form of logic?

posted at: 12:25 | tags: | path: /entries/rant | permanent link to this entry