Category: Computers

Everything that has to do with, guess what, computers. :-)

Categories
Computers Mac WTF

Snow Leopard’s “Disk Utility” can’t create encrypted image

Two months or so I ordered the Snow Leopard DVD for my Macbook Pro. Finally I had the time to perform the upgrade from Leopard. Before actually doing so, I tried to create a disk image of my current Leopard installation. So I booted the Snow Leopard DVD and ran “Disk Utility” from it. Because the target of that disk image was an external hard drive shared by my team, I wanted to create an encrypted image.

Regardless of whether I selected “128-Bit AES” or “256-Bit AES” as an encryption method, I immediately received the following error message on screen:

Unable to create "Macintosh HD.dmg" (Cannot allocate memory)

What is this trying to tell me? No space on hard drive? Impossible, since the external hard drive is a 2 TB empty drive. Moreover, “memory” usually refers to “main memory”, or “RAM.” So is Disk Utility actually trying to read the whole 200 GB hard drive into the RAM, then encrypting it, and then creating the disk image from it?! I can’t believe that anyone would be that stupid to design a disk imaging program like this…

I finally changed the image format to “Compressed”, and presto, it worked!

Anyway, why, oh why is it so hard to generate “user friendly” error messages? And why does this happen under Mac OS X of all operating systems, supposedly being the “user friendliest” OS in the universe?

This is not the first time I receive such useless error messages in OS X. Hey Apple, care to finally make your homework???

Categories
Networking Windows

Cisco VPN install nightmare on Vista

Here’s another Cisco VPN client nightmare for you:

The old 4.9.x.x Cisco VPN client does’t run under Vista anymore. So I downloaded the most current version our organization has available, 5.0.05.290. I started the installer and pretty quickly received an error message that simply said: “Internal Error 2738″.

I thought maybe the install file was corrupt, so I redownloaded it — same error.

Now I read the readme file (which I normally don’t do ;-)) It said you need a Microsoft hotfix in order to be able to install the VPN client. So I downloaded that one as well and retried the installation after rebooting the machine — same error message agin.

Damn!

So I googled for this problem and quickly came across this website — which indeed fixed the problem for me.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making such a lousy job of not registering said DLL. And thanks, Cisco, for not pointing your customers to this problem.

Gaaaawd, how I hate monopolies…

Categories
Computers deutsch Fun

Anleitung ext. Festplattengehäuse: selten so gebrüllt…

…vor Lachen! 🙂

Habe mir gerade bei einem lokalen Händler das günstigste externe Festplattengehäuse gekauft, was sie dort im Programm haben, um bequem alte Festplatten löschen und dann entsorgen zu können.

Nur aus Neugier habe ich dann mal die Anleitung durchgeblättert — dabei bin ich dann vor Lachen fast vom Stuhl gefallen. Der Marketing-Spezialist, der diese Anleitung formuliert hat, versteht sein Fach wirklich!!! 😀

Zitat:

Das Siliziumdioxid-Gehäuse ist ein spezielles Material, das sich besonders von einem konventionellen Aluminium-Gehäuse unterscheidet, da es besondere Eigenschaften unter rauhen Bedingungen oder starken Erschütterungen bietet. Die glatte Oberfläche des Gehäuses vermindert Reibung — wodurch ebenfalls ein hoher Datendurchsatz gewährleistet wird. Der Kernteil des Ausgleichssystems ist ein magnetischer Schreib-/Lesekopf, der automatisch ausgeglichen wird und eine besonders hohe Sicherheit bietet.

Herrlich! Da fragt man sich unwillkürlich, was der gute Mensch wohl geraucht hat?! 🙂

Categories
Windows WTF

Vista picture “Web Publishing” regression

I just tried to upload some hundreds of vacation photos from Windows Vista to our gallery which I’m hosting on my own root server. It turned out that this would be a not-so-simple task… 🙁

Previously, using Windows XP, this would be as simple as

  1. invoking the “Web Publishing Wizard” from the “Folder Tasks” pane,
  2. clicking “Publish this folder to the web”,
  3. optionally selecting a target size for resizing (a copy of!) the photos before you upload them, and finally
  4. clicking “Finish” to start the upload.

Not so anymore with Vista!

Continue reading “Vista picture “Web Publishing” regression”
Categories
Computers WTF

Dell to mislead customers, no compensation, no excuse

My cousin ordered a Dell monitor SX2210, a 21.5″ 16:9 model with a webcam, dual mike-array, FullHD resolution, HDMI connector, and (supposedly) speakers built in.

Getting the webcam working was a no-brainer, but strangely I had massive problems getting the internal speakers running.

After fiddling around for a while with the soundcard’s internal settings under Windoze XP (which I thought might have been incorrect, altho the old monitor’s speakers were working well,) I had the idea to connect my iPod to check whether the speakers are working at all — duh! No sound output at all. 🙁

So obviously the speakers were broken. Consequently, we called Dell to inquire about this. And now comes the unbelievable…

Continue reading “Dell to mislead customers, no compensation, no excuse”
Categories
Development WTF

Odd runtime exception due to leap second… ;-)

I just discovered a highly unusual issue that really made me laugh…

We have an application that generates event logfiles which contain, among other items, a processing time in ms. These logfiles are parsed by a different application.

On 2009-01-01 at 00:59:59 local time (UTC+1) this application generated an exception because it couldn’t properly parse the logfile. There was a negative processing time which should never occur. WTF?!

Considering the strange date and time and then thinking about it some fractions of a second (;-)) I immediately found the reason for this strange issue:

Exactly at that time a so-called “leap second” was inserted, so that 00:59:59 occurred “twice.” And since the second occurence was just between the first and second measure point, we had a negative duration of 912 ms (instead of 88 ms.) 🙂

Now, is that a strange problem??? Can you beat that?! 😉

Categories
Computers WTF

Microsoft installs Firefox extension without approval

I just had a very unpleasant experience when I noticed a suspicious Firefox extension in my wife’s XP account, called “Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant.” I immediately blaimed her for installing possibly malicious software, but she insisted it wasn’t her who did it. So I googled for this extension, and had to apologize to her afterwards…

It turned out that this is an extension Microsoft installs into Firefox when you install Microsoft .NET — and of course they don’t even ask whether to install it or not.

Here‘s some simple instructions of how to get rid of this shit… And here some more info…

Gaaawd how I hate Microsoft for these dirty tricks… 🙁

Categories
Computers Mac

Mac OS X “svn” client doesn’t know about common CA certs

I recently stumbled across a problem with Mac OS X Leopard’s “svn” (Subversion) client which doesn’t know about common root CAs (such as Thawte in my case,) even tho they are in the system keychain (which you can view using “Keychain Access.”)

It turned out that it only uses the certificates it find in /System/Library/OpenSSL/certs.

The strange thing is that the Thawte certificate in fact is already present on Mac OS, but it’s inside /usr/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt, which svn doesn’t know about. So what I did to make it work is the following:

I extracted the certificate from /usr/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt and copied it to /tmp/thawte.pem. I then determined the hash of the certificate as follows and created a link to the original certificate bundle (as superuser!):

#openssl x509 -in /tmp/thawte.pem -noout -hash
ddc328ff
#ln -s /usr/share/curl/curl-ca-bundle.crt /System/Library/OpenSSL/certs/ddc328ff.0

Voilà! Now I could connect to our Subversion repository without receiving a warning like the following:

Error validating server certificate for 'https://our.repos.de:443':
- The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Categories
Computers Mac WTF

MBP: Internal keyboard and trackpad lock-up

I just had another annoying problem with my MacBook Pro 4.1, running Mac OS X 10.5.6.

I left the machine unattended for like 10 minutes or so, and when I came back the screensaver was active. Sliding a finger over the trackpad wouldn’t produce the log-on dialog, nor would pressing keys on the internal keyboard. The machine was not crashed, however, since the screensaver animation was still running. What was even more strange is that the “Power on/off” button would work — when I shortly pressed it, the log-on prompt would appear.

Fortunately my view fell upon an external USB mouse, which I immediately tried. Voilà! I could move the mouse pointer with the external mouse, but the trackpad and internal keyboard were still dead.

I then attached an external keyboard, and that one also worked.

Back in Mac OS X I stopped all running applications, and restarted the MBP. Afterwards, all was fine again.

What the heck is this??? I thought Mac OS X was famous for its stability and reliability?! Is that what makes it “superior to Windoze” (according to a considerable fraction of Mac users)???

Categories
Computers Debian Linux

Courier IMAP: Could not log in after Debian 5.0 upgrade

After I had upgraded my server to Debian 5.0, I found that I could no longer log in via IMAP. I turned authentication debugging on by changing /etc/courier/authdaemonrc as follows:

DEBUG_LOGIN=1

This did not reveal any problems. Here’s an excerpt from mail.info:

authdaemond: received auth request, service=imap, authtype=cram-md5
authdaemond: authmysql: trying this module
authdaemond: cram: challenge=[...], response=[...]
authdaemond: cram: decoded challenge/response, username 'user@example.org'
authdaemond: SQL query: SELECT username, crypt, clear, uid, gid, pop, "",
  "", realname, "" FROM users WHERE username = 'user@example.org'
authdaemond: cram validation succeeded
authdaemond: Authenticated: sysusername=<null>, sysuserid=1000,
  sysgroupid=1000, homedir=/home/user/var/mail/example.org/user,
  address=user@example.org, fullname=Joe User, maildir=<null>,
  quota=<null>, options=<null>

Even though all seemed fine, Thunderbird complained about “server doesn’t support secure authentication.”

So I telnetted into my IMAP server by issuing telnet localhost imap and manually logged in as follows:

a login user@example.org thePass

Now I noticed immediately what was wrong:

* BYE [ALERT] Fatal error: Account's mailbox directory is not owned
  by the correct uid or gid:

The solution is that Courier now by default performs stricter checks on the “sanity” of your setup. I changed /etc/courier/imapd as follows, and all was fine again:

IMAP_MAILBOX_SANITY_CHECK=0