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…

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Categories
deutsch WTF

DPD-Paketdienst-Zumutung: Zustellung an falsche Person

Meine Frau rief mich gestern mit vor Wut bebender Stimme (so habe ich sie bisher sehr selten erlebt!) im Büro an, um sich bei mir über den Paketdienst DPD zu beschweren.

Was war geschehen?

Durch eine Versandmitteilung wussten wir, dass an diesem Tag ein Paket an uns geliefert werden sollte. Meine Frau hatte sich schon sehr auf das Paket gefreut und blieb daher den ganzen Tag zu Hause, um ja nicht die Zustellung zu verpassen.

Als nachmittags das Paket immer noch nicht zugestellt worden war, ging sie zum Briefkasten um nachzuschauen, ob dort eine Mitteilung des Paketdienstes hinterlassen wurde. Und in der Tat fand sie eine solche vor — allerdings war diese offensichtlich nicht vom DPD-Zusteller dort hinterlassen worden, sondern von einer uns unbekannten Familie, die etwa 300 m von uns entfernt in der selben Straße wohnt.

Die Nachricht besagte, dass wir das Paket bei ihnen oder einer anderen Familie — mit dem selben Nachnamen wir wir! — bei ihnen im Haus abholen könnten.

Wie ist das zu erklären?

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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
Categories
Computers Debian Linux

SVN database broken after Debian 5.0 upgrade?

After I had upgraded to Debian 5.0 SVN told me its database was broken. I googled for this problem and quickly found the solution:

svnadmin recover /var/lib/svn

This did the trick!

Categories
Linux WTF

Gallery2 not in Debian 5.0?!

When I upgraded to Debian 5.0 lately I noticed that there is no Gallery2 package anymore in Lenny. So I asked the Debian maintainer about this.

Here’s what he replied:

Gallery 2 is not available in Lenny due to large amount of differences between the previous version and 2.3-1 from unstable. The release team and I decided not to include Gallery 2 in stable due to this disruptive change late in the release process. The gallery2 package from sid can be installed via pinning.

WTF?! 🙁

Categories
Computers

Startled by “component device mismatches” on RAID1 volumes

I was startled today by a message in syslog that seems to point to a problem with my RAID1 volumes:

Mar  1 01:13:54 server mdadm[961]: RebuildFinished event detected on md device /dev/md3, component device  mismatches found: 512

This value is reflected in the following counter:
root:/etc/mdadm# cat /sys/block/md3/md/mismatch_cnt 512

I tried to clarify this by googling around, but I found no definitive answer whether this is an actual problem or not. However, I found a way to resync the MD components so that no mismatches remain:

root:/etc/mdadm# echo repair >> /sys/block/md3/md/sync_action

After you execute the repair you will notice that the counter shows the same number of mismatches again:

root:/etc/mdadm# cat /sys/block/md3/md/mismatch_cnt 512

This was to be expected — because the repair corrected (and thus encountered) this number of mismatches. So, if you force a check again, the counter should be down to 0:

root:/etc/mdadm# echo check >> /sys/block/md3/md/sync_action
root:/etc/mdadm# watch cat /proc/mdstat
[wait until check is finished]
root:/etc/mdadm# cat /sys/block/md3/md/mismatch_cnt
0