Unixpeople

(rant was first published May 20, 2003)

I opened the snail mail tonight, and found that my vehicle registration is due.

Here is a breakdown of the bill:
Registration Fee: $30
Vehicle Registration Fee: $504
County/District Fees: $8
SMOG Abatement Fee: $6

Ok, so I’m not even going to think about how the SMOG abatement fee somehow makes the air cleaner for me, but whatever – its only $6.

What I’m really annoyed about are two things.

First, at the bottom of the Fees section, there is an item called “VLF Offset: $-340.00”

So, why do they do that? Maybe I’m supposed to feel better about the bill? “Whew! I dodged a bullet there! The government just gave me $340.00!”. Why don’t they just change the VLF fee at the top from $504 to $164????

The second item – and its way more annoying – as a matter of fact, it really pisses me off – is the nice box on the left that says:

————
RENEW VIA THE INTERNET
Your Renewal Identification
Number is 999999 (see attached insert)
Our Web address is
WWW.DMV.CA.GOV
———–

So I look at the attached insert and it reads like some guy announcing the prizes on a game show:

—-
Congratulations! You’ve won an all expenses-paid trip to Hawaii, with three wonderful nights and 4 days in beautiful Maui!!!!!!
—-

Except its like this:
——
You are eligible to rewnew your registration on the Internet!
——

“Oh Martha, get yer coat! We get to renew via the Internet!” Then it continues….
——
DMV has added online registration renewal via the Internet as an alternative method of doing business. Be among the first to take advantage of DMV’s new online service and renew your registration within minutes.
——

I’m going to add that to my resume:
… as well as being the 404th guy that watched the Mars probe landing over the Internet, I was also *one of the first* to use DMV’s online registration service!”

But wait! There’s more!

——
Online Renewal is:
Convenient: Your registration is renewed within minutes…
Simple: Your billing notice contains a RIN that is your access number
Easy: Using your RIN and a credit card, you may complete your renewal in a few easy steps!

There is a $4 convenience fee to renew your registration online
——–

Explain to me how “Simple” is different from “Easy”. Maybe I’m so “simple”, that I need to be told twice?

Hold the phone! What the heck is that last bit there? Let me read it again….. “There is a $4 convenience fee….”

Oh you see. Now I’m really pissed. I really, really hate it when places charge me a convenience fee. I don’t mind a “bend-me-over” fee, but don’t call it a convenience fee. What they are saying when they do that is, “well, we simply found an easy way to charge you some more money!” There. That was simple and easy!

See my BART rant about convenience fees – oh and look for a new rant about ticketmaster – coming soon.

I’m serious here. We need some truth in advertising. I think something like, “In order to cover the cost of additional infrastructure to handle these new Internet transactions, there is a $4 fee associated with
the online renewal. Once the infrastructure is paid for, this fee will no longer be charged.”

I would gladly pay the $4 in that case, but don’t call it a fucking convenience fee!

But really folks, Why should it cost me a “convenience fee” when its going to save them money? They don’t have to pay someone to open the envelope and enter the payment into the computer, then take the check to the bank and deposit it and wait for it to clear, etc. etc. They don’t have to pay for this person to attend extensive sensitivity training so they know how to be sensitive while ignoring me while I’m standing in the fucking line waiting for those incompetent bastards to provide me with “outstanding service”.

Next time you are in the DMV, have a look around at the signs on the walls. Have you ever noticed that there are a multitude of signs that remind you that it is a federal offence to threaten or annoy the DMV workers, punishable by several years in ram-me-in-the-butt federal prison? Why do they find it necessary to remind us of that? Does the seven-eleven have similar signs? No. They remind us of that because it happens all the time. Because they don’t know how to run a fricking business. But you know – thats another story.

Hmmm, lets see… Do I renew over the Internet or via snail mail? Its a tough choice… I’d better think about this for a while…. I know! I’ll think about it while I’m looking for my check-book and stamps.

I purchased an IBM B-50 from ebay.
When it arrived, I followed the standard practice at Collation and:
-attached it’s console to the lantronix terminal server
-added the console port and its IP address to DNS

Its standard at Collation to install servers and workstations using a network install. We do network installs of Solaris via jumpstart, and linux via kickstart, but unfortunately, it seems that I need something called NIM to install it, and NIM has to run on an AIX box. Since this is the first AIX box, I’m going to have to do it manually.

Try to buy a copy of AIX 5.2…. see my other rant on this.

Finally, get AIX 5.2. Put cdrom #1 in the drive and boot the machine. Press the “1” key or the “5” key after seeing the keyboard test on the console. “5” causes the machine to boot off the cdrom.

At this point I realized that there was no hard drive in the machine… Ok, so I add a hard drive – externally – because the proprietary hot swap bay is $250… Ouch.

Reboot the machine from the cdrom. Indicate that I want english and I want to install on the hard disk and I want this tty to be the console.

Installation proceeds, then the system reboots. I get the Console Login prompt, but I can’t login. Its like the ENTER key is not being accepted….
Try all sorts of terminal emulation programs – minicom, hyperterminal, etc. Try connecting directly and through the terminal server – same result.

Eventually, I booted off the cdrom in Repair mode, and used smitty to enable dhcp on the network interface. On reboot, the machine gets and address and I can successfully telnet into the machine.

+++Talked to an AIX guru friend of mine (Thanks Jabbar) and he says that the machine is probably expecting to talk to an IBM 3151 terminal.

Added the NIS server, asterix, and its IP address to /etc/hosts, then used “mkclient -S asterix” to configure NIS.

Started ypbind.

I used smitty to umount and delete /home, but left the mount point.

Used smitty to start automountd, but regardless of what I did, I couldn’t get it to use the NIS auto.master and auto.home tables.

Eventually, I just configured the /etc/auto_master and /etc/auto_home but still no joy – its almost like automounter is just totally broken on AIX. Even tried using the /usr/samples/nfs/auto_master file as a template.
Tried restarting automountd using “stopsrc automountd” and “startsrc automountd”. It still doesn’t work. Try rebooting. automount doesn’t even start.

+++Jabbar says that the automounter on aix is just broken – don’t use it.

Try “ypcat -k auto.master” – it says domainname isn’t set
Where the hell are the error messages?
+++Jabbar says to use “errrpt -a”
Why isn’t the domainname set on reboot? Where the hell is the console terminal type set?

Periodically, ypbind (which does seem to know the NIS domainname) starts claiming that the NIS server is not responding. Reboot the machine – Now it works. Thats just ugly.

Gave up on automountd. Disabled it with smitty and removed all the /etc/auto* files. Used smitty to mount/home via nfs from majestix. Of course on reboot, it wasn’t mounted….

Try to get /home to be persistent. Use smitty
->System Storage Management (Physical and Logical)
->File Systems
->Add/Change/Show/Delete File systems
->NFS

Wait! whats this! NIS settings….
->NIS
->change NIS domainname!

Ok, I don’t know why the AIX people put the NIS settings under NFS, but at least I’ve found them now.

Download ssh from www.bullfreeware.com Run the .exe file which appears to be a self-extracting archive containing a .bff file. Tried to use “smitty install_latest” to install the bff file – it fails
when I press F4 to list the software in the directory. Tried using “.” as well as the fully qualified path – doesn’t work.

Here is the error message:
—-
1800-106 An error occurred
geninstall: The specified device /home/abarclay/src/aix/ is not a valid device or file.
—-

Run “man -k install” – fails. Run “catman -w”, then re-run “man -k install”
Tried installp – nope… looking for /dev/fd…..
Dammit, its the f4 thats failing to make a list of the available software… why would it fail. in desperation, copy the bff file to /tmp and change to that directory and re-run the smitty install_latest
Now it works! Thats just stupid.

Create the host keys using ssh_keygen -t rsa and ssh_keygen -t rsa1
and ssh_keygen -t dsa
Created the sshd priv sep user. Apparently, can’t use /bin/false as a shell
for the user – have to use a real shell….
Had to use “sshd” as the pgroup, not the gidNumber…. Thats unusual.
Had to create /var/empty and /var/empty/sshd before create user
Finally, sshd started.

Now, we need to figure out how to get it to start on system reboot.

The ypbind is just really flaky. It keeps saying that the NIS server is not responding, AND when that happens, all network access seems to just die. Ping doesn’t even work – Not even by IP address! Finally created a yp server on the same subnet so the ypbind could broadcast to find the server and now its perfectly happy.

Tried to download the latest critical patches for AIX following instructions from Bruce Spencer’s newsletter. The fucking applet doesn’t work on linux and the ftp from the command line keeps throwing connection resets. I’ll try later from Windows.

When I try to scp to the AIX machine, it reports “scp not found”. I know that ssh is trying to run scp, but it should know to look in /usr/local/bin…. create a link from /usr/local/bin/scp to /usr/bin/scp
and now it works.

Need to install lsof. bullfreeware doesn’t have it pre-packaged, so I decide to compile it. Download the gcc package from bullfreeware and run it to extract the bff file. Copy the bff file to /tmp and it runs out of space. Have to use smitty to bump up the size of /tmp to 400 meg. Re-try the install. Hmmmm, for some reason it doesn’t see the gcc software. It only seems to see the ssh. Ah, it seems that smitty creates a .toc file and doesn’t bother checking to see if there is new software there – very efficient and very annoying. Remove the .toc file and re-try the install Now it works.
Also download and install sudo using the same procedure – don’t forget to
remvoe the .toc file.

Used smitty to increase size of /usr to 900 meg
Try to build lsof
$ ./Configure aixgcc
$ make
-failed
Gave up on building it – found a binary

May, 2003

My two year old son ripped the arms off my wife’s sunglasses and I was tasked with getting them fixed.

So, I go to RayBan’s website, and they have instructions for sending them for repair. Of course, when you call the phone number, its pretty much a recorded message that focuses on WARRANTY repairs. Now, I understand that this is not a warranty issue, its a REPAIR issue, so I sent the glasses back to the address they listed.

Issue Number One:
Its not RayBan, its some company called Luxottica Group – and it seems that they just handle the customer service for rayban – I could be wrong here….

Issue Number Two:
The address where you have to send this stuff is a post-office box. Thats a pretty serious problem because UPS won’t deliver there, so you have to send it regular post and there is no way to insure the package (These are $150 sunglasses).

So I sent them regular mail along with a check for $10 (processing fee) hoping that the sunglasses would actually get there. I included a note that said, “Please repair the sunglasses and if there is an additional charge, please let me know”.

A month goes by and a package from the Luxottica Group arrived today, Fri Jun 27, 2003. I openned up the package, and the un-repaired sunglasses are included – along with a note.

The note starts by saying how much they appreciate my business, then quickly falls into some dribble, saying, “this is not a warranty repair, and that style is discontinued” – essentially, “Sorry about your luck.”

The sunglasses are only two years old?????!!! Its fine to discontinue stuff, but companies should be required to keep parts around for a few years. I know automotive manufacturers are required to produce parts for a certain number of years.

I would have been happy if they had offerred any sort of compromise – Even something like, “Look, we have a similar pair of glasses available, and we are willing to sell them to you for half the list price…..”

I will never buy another pair of RayBan sunglasses. I used to buy ONLY RayBan. I liked the glass lenses and the feel of them. Also, in the past, I always received good service from RayBan. It seems they have decided to cut costs at the expense of customer service. I think thats really short-sighted.

On May 16th, 2003, I contacted linksys support because the two WAP-11 Access Points were hanging. The only fix for this was to actually unplug the power to the access points and then plug them back in.
———–
Hi,
I can consistently get my WAP11 to hang when I send a bunch of data though
it. For example, when I ftp a 200 meg file from my laptop to a local server,
the WAP11 will almost always hang.
———–

On the 17th, I received the following response:
———–
It would be better if you lessen the file transfer a little bit to prevent
heavy trafffic on the network.

If you have further questions, please contact us at (800) 326-7114 or send
us an email at support@linksys.com so that we may further assist you.
Please use this phone number given as reference for future support calls.

Thank you and have a nice day.
———–

Thanks! Thats like the old joke, “Doctor, it hurts when I lift my arm like this! – and the doctor responds, “Don’t do that”.

I responded to this with another email:
—————-
Hi Gloria,
Although I believe that your workaround will fix the problem,
I’m afraid I’m not satisfied with the response.

I am using two WAP11s here at my workplace. There are normally
two or three people using the wireless concurrently. How is
it that I can keep them from not doing large file transfers?

I don’t really care how slow the wireless is, but I don’t
feel that the WAP11 should HANG and require a hard reboot
to recover.

I have successfully ran several users though an old apple
airport and have never had it hang – EVER.

Have you had other customers with this problem? Is it
hanging because of too much data on the wireless side, or
too much data on the ethernet side? If its too much data
on the ethernet side, can you offer some suggestion on
how to limit the data throughput?
—————-

And got the following response:
————-
With regards to your problem, you may try setting the thresholds (RTS and
Fragmentation) of both WAP11 to 2304 but there’s no assurance that you’ll
not experience hang ups anymore. You may also try to upgrade the firmware of
your access points.
————-

Um, I’ve checked, and I’m already running the latest firmware, so that leaves the other thresh-holds. I was busy, so I waited a few months, and just made a point to rebooting the APs whenever they hung – This was usually 3 times per day or so.

Finally, in July, I got tired of this and I set the parameters as per the email from linksys support.

Of course, it hung again, so as a last resort, I called linksys phone support.

I can now say that I have officially spoken with the absolute, most idiotic tech support person ever.
I explained my situation, and asked him what else I could try.
He had 3 suggestions:

1) try changing the channel

2) try changing the ESSID. I stopped him here. I said, “what the hell will changing the ESSID do?” He responded that it will boost the signal…… Oh my God. Attention technical support people – Try not to blow smoke up my ass like this. Go ahead and tell me things like “Look, the product is crap – you should upgrade to the new access point. It will work for you”, but don’t tell me that changing the ESSID will boost the fucking signal.

3) try upgrading the firmware. I said, “I’m already running the latest firmware”. He said, “upgrade it anyway – sometimes it fixes things”.

Ok, I’m certainly not going to change the ESSID. This is a non-trivial event because all my clients have it hard-coded, and I’m not going around to 20 machines and making the change.

But you know what – I will try changing the channel and the re-flashing the firmware – while I wait for my new Proxim AP-2000s to arrive.

Wed Aug 13 14:09:54 PDT 2003

One of the people here at work dropped his laptop yesterday. I went to Dell’s website to see if I could figure out how to send it for repair.

While there, I noticed a tab on the left side of the page that said, “Manage my systems”. Clicking on it, I noticed it seemed like I could enter all my service tags and then it would
be easier to lookup updates, etc.

In terms of the dropped laptop, I eventually gave up trying to find the information on the website and phoned up the Gold support line. Dell gets an A+ for this one because they actually told me on the phone that the repair of the laptop is covered under warranty – even though I asked them for their billable repairs department. So thats all worked out, but now back to the website
issue.

I start entering service tags and descriptions. I finally get to number 16, and it says, “Error, you can’t add any more service tags”. What the heck? I have about 25 dell systems that I manage, and the service is useless if I can’t add them all. So, I send a message to the webmaster using a link at the bottom of the page.

Very blatantly, it says on the page, “This is NOT a technical support email. This should only be used for website issues”. So, I fill in the question, “I want to add a bunch of service tags to the “manage my system tab”, but it only lets me add 15. Why is that, and can I increase it somehow?”

I get back a response which is just stupid:

Thank you for contacting Dell US eSupport. An artificial intelligence tool designed to interpret your message and respond quickly will conduct this first reply to your message.

….. snip – some stuff deleted ……..

1. I want to upgrade my system’s memory, what do I need to order?
2. How do I install my memory upgrade?
3. I’m curious, SIMM, DIMM, RIMM – what does all of this technical stuff mean?

It then provided the answers to these questions…..
I just don’t understand it – They KNOW its not a technical support question because I sent it to the webmaster. Why provide me with answers to technical support questions?

At least it did say I could respond to this email if the answers didn’t fit my question. I’ve done that. Lets see if the actual human is more helpful.

November, 2004

Although I live in California, I own a house in Canada which I rent out. Scotiabank handles the mortgage on this property and I have a chequing account with them for this reason.

About 6 months ago I wanted to pull the equity out of my house up there (its currently a rental), and purchase another rental property. This was driven by the fact that I don’t have enough interest and expenses to offset the income and I really don’t want to pay Canadian income tax.

So, I email my rep and get the ball rolling. She says its no problem and she gives me the costs associated with the thing. $400 for an appraisal, then they will let me take out up to 75% of the value as a kind of line of credit which I could use to put a down payment on the new property.

I tell her to go ahead with this. 3 days later she calls me back. She says that they don’t normally loan money to people with addresses outside of Canada, but since I’m such a good customer, they will let me pull out up to 50% of the value of the house, but if I purchase another rental property, they will only give me a mortgage if I put 50% down on the property. Well, it didn’t take me long to do the math on this one – it just won’t work. I told her that I didn’t think this policy made any sense, but I just decided it wasn’t worth making a fuss about.

Last week I noticed that I no longer seemed to get any interest in my chequing account. I asked them about it and they mentioned that the chequing account no longer earns interest, but that I should open a money master savings account. Ok, so I go down to the branch while I was in Canada for vacation and ask about it.
“You’ll need to make an appointment for some time next week”, the receptionist says. “Um, I won’t be here next week”, I say…. “Can I do this over the net?”. She says, “Sure, over the net or by phone will work”.

So I call them on the phone and open the account. “I’d like to automatically sweep anything over $2000 from the chequing account into the savings account each month”, I say. The guy on the phone says, “Sure, how much do you want to transfer each month?” I say, “I don’t know. Just whatever is greater than $2000 in the account”. He says, “Ok, I’ll transfer $2000 per month into the new account.”. I said, “No, just whatever is greater than $2000…”. We finally get it worked out and he says, “Um, we can’t do that. We can
only transfer a certain amount of money each month”.

I give up – I tell him that I’ll just do it manually. He says, Ok, it will take 72 hours to setup the account (it will be visible via the Internet) and another 4 days before I can actually transfer money into or out of the account.

I get a call today and he says that he is sorry, but they can’t open the account because I have a US address. The account has to be a foreign account with tax withholding. “Ok”, I say, “make it one of those accounts”. He says, “you’ll have to go into the branch to do that”. I try to explain that I can’t just pop-in to the branch at lunch time because I’m 2500 miles away, but this seems lost to him.

I explained to him that he is really making it hard for me to continue dealing with Scotiabank. They just can’t seem to deal well with people who don’t have a Canadian address.

Wed Oct 29 08:03:28 PST 2003
I needed an architecture independent method of installing Collation’s Confignia product, so after reading a bunch of reviews, I decided on Zero G’s InstallAnywhere software.

Of course, it makes sense to evaluate the product before buying, so I tried to download the trial edition.

So, I go to their site to download the product. There are 3 products to choose from, and I finally found a comparison sheet. I’ve decided that we need the enterprise edition – its $2995. So I click on the download and it sends me to a registration form. I fill out the registration form and click submit and it gives me a tomcat error. So I click back and submit again, and this time it says it works.

Yesterday, I get the email (shown below) and click on the link to download the product and I get connection refused. I decide to just wait until today and try again. Today, it doesn’t give me connection refused, it just sends me back to the main zerog.com page after a short delay – NICE!

I figure, ok, its time to ask them for some support, so I click on the link to get support and it takes me to a form that I can fill in. I fill in all the parts and click submit, and (you guessed it) jserv error.

Technology just doesn’t work.

So, my bank….
I wanted to cancel my savings account because, well, because savings accounts are stupid. I only opened it because one time about 2 years ago I walked into a branch to deposit some foreign currency or something and the lady asked me if I wanted to open a savings account. I said “no”, and she said, “um, look, if you open an account, I get $5, so that would be really cool.” I figured that was worth it – sticking it to the man, so to speak.

No good deed goes unpunsihed

Anyway, I logged into the bofa web based interface and there is no way to cancel the account, so I had to email them. I said, “transfer all the money from my savings to my checking and then close the account AND cancel the montly transfer”.

I get a canned response that start with “We can help you with your request”. Then they proceed to tell me that because there is money in the savings account, they can’t cancel it. So, I transfer the money out and respond to the email saying, “ok, I transfered the money to my checking. Now, please cancel my savings account”

I get a response that starts with, “We can help you.” then they say, there are still pending transactions on that account so we can’t cancel the account.

So, I wait a day and send them this. “Look, I don’t know if there are pending transactions, or an ice storm in Nebraska, but my balance says 0, so can you please cancel my savings account”.
“We can help you with your request”. We’ve cancelled your monthly auto-transfer from checking to savings. But my account is still open….

I just know that if I push this, they will cancel my checking account.

At the request of a friend of mine from my home town, I joined facebook. Initially, I thought it was pretty nice and within a few months, I managed to connect with various people that I’d lost touch with over the years including:

• Someone from my kindergarten class
• A girl-friend from high school
• A girl I had a crush on in high school (and who is now a detective constable)
• Several of the people that I still associate with whenever I visit my home town
• Various and Sundry people who I would consider acquaintances (at most)

Its that last category that has me in trouble now. Although I’m using facebook as an example, I’ve had the problem with other social networking sites (specifically linkedIn).

Here is the problem. I get “friend/network requests” from people who:

• I can’t actually remember at all. I mean, their name sounds vaguely familiar, but the picture (if there is one) doesn’t actually ring a bell.
• I don’t really like – the worst of these are people that I once worked with who I really think are assholes and who couldn’t do their job if their life depended on it
• Are really interesting (in a car-wreck kind of way), but to whom I probably shouldn’t associate

The quandary is what do you do with these requests?

For the first category, I normally just break down and add them as friends. We have a quick conversation about the weather or “what have you been up to for the last 2 decades” and then they fade back into the woodwork never to be heard from again – no harm done.

The second category is different. I generally just sit on the request for a while and eventually delete it. I believe that if someone hires these folks because of my recommendation, (I think that “friending” someone on linkedIn in some way “recommends” them) and they are still idiots, then my reputation is tarnished.

The third category is the one that has me in trouble now. Recently, the marriage of one of my friends broke down due to an extra-marital affair. I received a “friend” request from the “other woman”. For about a week, I sat on the request, weighing the desire for more information on the situation against the possible negative side-effects. I knew that should my friend’s wife find that I was communicating with this woman, she would feel this was in some way advocating this affair – which I do not.  Eventually, however, the desire to get the other worman’s story won out over the more pragmatic side of me, and I accepted the friend request. Over a span of about one week, we had a conversation of 6 messages none of which increased my understanding of the situation at all.

Today, I received a chastising message from a friend who had looked at my profile and found that I was “friends” with this woman – it seems that this fact was spreading like wild-fire (and causing just about the same amount of destruction).

I care deeply for my friend and his wife and I like to think I would not do anything to hurt either of them, however, it appears thats exactly what I’ve done. I deleted the “other woman” from my friend list shortly after.

In summary, I think the right thing to do is to drive right on by that car accident on the freeway – don’t look over and don’t slow down. I wish thats what I had done.