Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[cyclin_al]

Urrrggghhh. Late starting the kids on their first day of school due to configurating my new WiFi/VPN router.
My balls already ache...   



mnem
And now it wants to do a FW update...   

One thing... this router runs FAST. Like 20-30 seconds for a reboot. Gotta love that 3-core CPU; I wonder if there's a 4th core that can be unlocked... 

*remembering many afternoons spent at a console waiting for CISCOs to reboot 5-8 minutes at a time*

mnem
*shudder*

Yeah one reason that Cisco 1941 ISR I have is sitting in the hall still rather than being my router. I got it and now I'm not in the mood for a ball kicking 

Ugggh. I misunderstood the manual when I was shopping this thing... while I CAN limit router management to a single specific MAC address(es), I cannot limit it to a single interface or preferably a single ETH port like a REAL router; if I add the MAC of my WiFi adapter to the management whitelist it happily pops up a login portal.

Why the FUCK would ANY router manufacturer ever take away such a fundamental security measure...? 

Fucking toy.  If I can't find a precompiled build of OpenWRT I think it's going back. A shame too... awesome hardware otherwise.

mnem
assholes.

At least I waited until after I took the kid to school to start on mine.    Oh no, I am not competitive, no, not at all ....

First thing I noticed was that the patch cable supplied with it is only cat5.  Not even cat5e.  They do advertise very prominently that it has a Gigabit WAN port.  Will never get that performance with a cat5 cable.  Immediately replaced with cat6; at least I have a supply of those on hand.

Second thing that set off alarm bells in my head is this little paper slip, not much bigger than a business card that says "Some older versions of driver or software for wireless devices may be incompatible with 802.11ax router."  Uh oh, I have some embedded devices that i may or may not be able to update.  I have older devices that up till now worked fine, will have to see how this works out.  Also, that is not consistent with the TP-Link website (https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/archer-ax1500/) which quotes "Backward Compatible: Archer AX1500 supports all previous 802.11 standards and all WiFi devices."

Third thing is common with consumer products where the wall wart is always rotated such that it blocks two receptacles on a power bar.  The advice is always to mount the device high up for better signal propagation, but the cord is never long enough.  Time to go shopping for an extension cord; I did not plan that one as well as the Ethernet cabling.

So in the end my network is lagging behind the dwagon network.  Did I say anything about being competitive?

[Specmaster]

You may recall that a while ago I purchased an ultrasonic cleaner from a Chinese company on eBay, the 11th July to be factual. It was delivered on the 14th July but was a 2L one, not the 3L as shown in 12 of the supporting photos on the listing. I raised return request via eBay, which the seller accepted on the 15th but postage was down to me, even though they mis-sold it to me. I spoke eBay, and they told me not to return it until either they sent me a prepaid returns label or sent me the postage costs. That started a long-drawn-out discussion between me, the seller and eBay, who found in my favour that I should get a full refund on the 27th July. The seller paid the postage cost to my PayPal account on the 27th and I returned the cleaner on the 28th by recorded delivery.

The item was delivered back to their dept on the 30th July and a signature obtained and the seller gave me a full refund on 1st August, great that was the end of it or, so I thought. On the 13th August, seller opened a dispute directly with PayPal pretending to be a buyer and claimed that the item that they paid for was never received and therefore claiming a full refund. They also used a different account name to the one I purchased from (it seems that all the industrial ultrasonic cleaners in the UK all come from Chinese sellers in the same town, and is about 4 or 5 company names and all the same prices, so the same real company hiding behind other names  )

Anyway, on the 13th August I provided PayPal with all the relevant eBay transaction and case numbers, along with my statement and copies of the receipt of postage and a copy of the proof of delivery, all of which they passed onto the "seller" who never once responded following their first claim. Today I get an email from PayPal who said that they had found in the buyers sellers favour and requested that I pay the amount claimed £10.91 into my account ASAP 

I saw red, checked the case details online and found out that even though, I had responded instantly when the claim was raised, the seller had not replied to my counterclaim in all that time and yet PayPal still found against me claiming that my evidence was invalid 

After a real struggle I managed to get past their automated telephone system and spoke to a human, who transferred me to the disputes dept and within a few minutes they had pulled my case notes and promptly reversed their ruling and cancelled the claim against me 

So my advice to others when dealing with a dispute over an item is to always get it documented with eBay through their system as it might well be required as evidence in your favour further down the line, even if the seller seems to be nice to you, the chance is always there for them to come back at you via other avenues as I discovered.

I think that Chinese companies can hide behind the language barrier and some claim falsely hoping that you will give up and let them win, bastards. Of course always YMMV, but be on your toes and watch out for similar scams as this.

[med6753]

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installed and running.

[capt bullshot]

WTF

Just checked my credit card transfers and found this one:
"HSA*HSADHL ONLINEFRANK BONN. DE"

Took a moment until I realized that's not a random Frank from somewhere online around Bonn, but DHL online shipping label service "Onlinefrankierung"

 

[tggzzz]

Start 'em young. 

That’s a win. It’s the modern equivalent of the radio shack 160-in-1 I got that started all this 

If I was starting now, I'd go into the life science for the same reasons I started with electronics and computers.

Ewwww! All that glibber.

In die Pumpe mit der Klumpe!

Yeah. But think of the potential to hack, in several senses of the word.

[tggzzz]

Start 'em young. 

That’s a win. It’s the modern equivalent of the radio shack 160-in-1 I got that started all this 

If I was starting now, I'd go into the life science for the same reasons I started with electronics and computers.

So, where is the equivalent of the Philips EE-20 or that 160-in-1 kit? For that matter, what would they enable you to do now and in 10 years time?

Today's equivalent might be an Arduino kit of some kind?

I was really thinking of a life sciences kit.

"Igor's genetic engineering and self-surgery kit*"
Bonus: extra tentacles in this kit.

*suitable for children from 6 to 60

Many people have the fantasy of having to fly a plane after the pilot is disabled...

I've always had this weird desire to do an operation on myself, something a little more interesting than digging pus out of an ingrowing toenail when stuck on top of a mountain after a 1500ft vertical climb.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, which is no less insane.....

[cyclin_al]

16.04 and 18.04 somewhat work in a way that 20.04 does not.

If I had to choose between 20.04 and chlamydia I'd probably go for Chlamydia.

Then what have I done ?? 

We (I and the 7 year old) finally completed the new build.  It is certainly more modern than anything else and I learned a lot on the way; thanks for all the guidance here.
[ Specified attachment is not available ]
I do not have a Win10 license at the moment to keep SWMBO happy, so I installed Win10 and then immediately tried my first ever linux install.  I chose Ubuntu 20.04.   The naive theory is the latest is greatest.  The idea is to use linux until I get hold of a Win10 license (worst case), and see how things go with linux.

The initial install went just fine.  So far I worked my way through configuring GRUB2, that was not too bad.

Yes, I dislike the snaps that is being used.  However, I think that is still far better than the Win10 crap.  At least it works on initial install.

The one thing I am getting hung up on is the strong user password requirements.  I tried creating a user account for a 7 year old and want to use a simple password.  I have not solved that one yet.  All my google foo is finding ways of enabling strong password enforcement in older versions of ubuntu, not disabling strong user passwords in 20.04.  By the way, on initial installation of 20.04, the root/su account does NOT enforce a strong password.

It says something when Ubuntu 20.04 is easier to setup with no experience, than a Win10 setup with experience !

Edit: for @mnem: That is the Ice Emperor's Dragon from LEGO (set 70678) Ninjago season 11.  For some reason, Zane is nowhere to be found.

[BU508A]

Have you tried this?

Let's assume, the user account for your 7-years old is alice.

As user root:

passwd alice
(Enter a password twice, e.g. 1234)

This should do it, ignore the warnings.

[bd139]

Start 'em young. 

That’s a win. It’s the modern equivalent of the radio shack 160-in-1 I got that started all this 

If I was starting now, I'd go into the life science for the same reasons I started with electronics and computers.

So, where is the equivalent of the Philips EE-20 or that 160-in-1 kit? For that matter, what would they enable you to do now and in 10 years time?

Today's equivalent might be an Arduino kit of some kind?

I was really thinking of a life sciences kit.

"Igor's genetic engineering and self-surgery kit*"
Bonus: extra tentacles in this kit.

*suitable for children from 6 to 60

Many people have the fantasy of having to fly a plane after the pilot is disabled...

I've always had this weird desire to do an operation on myself, something a little more interesting than digging pus out of an ingrowing toenail when stuck on top of a mountain after a 1500ft vertical climb.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, which is no less insane.....

Edit: I’ve removed this post as I have to read it again and it makes me feel sick which is a rarity.

[graybeard]

This is a recent $140 fleabay buy to add to my collection.



(3) ZSC-2-1-75 2-Way Power Splitter (0.25-300MHz, 75Ω)
(1) ZSC-4-1 4-Way Power Splitter (0.1-200MHz, 50Ω)
(1) ZSC-2-2 2-Way Power Splitter (0.002-60MHz, 50Ω)
(1) ZAD-1W Frequency Mixer (1-7500MHz, 50Ω)
(2) ZP-5H Frequency Mixer (20-1500MHz, 50Ω)
(7) ZFDC-10-21 Directional Coupler (1-1000MHz, 50Ω)
(2) ZFM-2 Frequency Mixer (1-1000MHz, 50Ω)
(2) ZFSC-2-11 Power Splitter (10-2000MHz, 50Ω)
(1) ZFDC-10-5 Directional Coupler (1-2000MHz, 50Ω)
(2) ZFRSC-2050 2-Way Power Splitter (DC-2000MHz, 50Ω)
(1) Engelmann Microwave DCK-1010 Directional Coupler (1-1000MHz, 10dB, 50Ω)
(1) Panatron IF 2-Way Power Divider T106048-1245-7BNC (10-1000MHz, 50Ω)

They all work!

Chris

[Saskia]

@mnem
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/diy-maker-school-make-co-books?hmb_source=navbar&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_4

[bd139]

Or library genesis 

[SilverSolder]

Start 'em young. 

That’s a win. It’s the modern equivalent of the radio shack 160-in-1 I got that started all this 

If I was starting now, I'd go into the life science for the same reasons I started with electronics and computers.

So, where is the equivalent of the Philips EE-20 or that 160-in-1 kit? For that matter, what would they enable you to do now and in 10 years time?

Today's equivalent might be an Arduino kit of some kind?

I was really thinking of a life sciences kit.

"Igor's genetic engineering and self-surgery kit*"
Bonus: extra tentacles in this kit.

*suitable for children from 6 to 60

Many people have the fantasy of having to fly a plane after the pilot is disabled...

I've always had this weird desire to do an operation on myself, something a little more interesting than digging pus out of an ingrowing toenail when stuck on top of a mountain after a 1500ft vertical climb.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, which is no less insane.....

Back in my college days, I had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a girl at a dinner party that had some item of food stuck in her throat, she couldn't breathe and was panicking.  The funny thing is, I had no idea what a Heimlich maneuver was at the time, no first aid training, nothing.  I did it totally instinctively, wrapped my arms around her from behind and used her lungs as bellows to shoot out the stuck material - because it was clear to me she would die if nobody did anything.  It worked...   thank God.  Being the "hero" was scary as hell.  Only much later did I stop shaking.  Not a situation I would ever wish to be in again...   apparently, thousands of people die this way every year.

[Fungus]

I’m so tempted to buy one of them as a leech box. Do they run headless?

Yes. I use mine for that. Monitor was only needed for installation, now it's unplugged. Access by remote desktop.

The cheapest one (the one I got) was only 112 Euros (without disk or RAM). It put a small SSD inside and a big spinning disk outside on a USB 3 port.

[mnementh]

Edit: for @mnem: That is the Ice Emperor's Dragon from LEGO (set 70678) Ninjago season 11.  For some reason, Zane is nowhere to be found.

Showed my son... he's totes jelly.



And that case is a cousin to the DeepCool MATREXX 55 ADD-RGB Mid-Tower Case I built my VR rig in. Airflow is not the best; you have to stay on it with a brush and keep the front mesh clean, even with 3 fans pushing out and 5 fans pulling in like mine.

Fortunately, water-cooled on CPU & GPU means it actually works better to have more volume of slower air so the air has time to absorb the heat.

mnem
 

[Robert763]

On the small "PC" line, The gutted HP iPaq that was running a monitor program on the front of my Thunderbolt GPSDO died. So I decided to stick a Raspberry PI and 5" HDMI touchscreen running Lady Heather in it. Been a few years since I last tried Linux. Picked up a NOS Pi B starter kit with keyboard, HDMI display PSU wi-fi dongle etc for £30 on ebay. While it all worked the old Raspian (Debian) would not load the tools needed to compile LH. and it was unhappy installing a later version. So I got a NOS Pi 3B, installed newer Raspberry Pi OS, compiled LH and transferred the uSD card to the Pi B. That all seemed to work and I've got the screen running and LH running automatically at boot. Just waiting for a 3.3V RS232 driver to arrive.
Been interesting. I looked at RPi when they first came out but was not impressed that Broadcom did not release data on the chip. I'm a hardware person not much of programmer. That said I currently writing embedded code for a medical device as part of the day job  My normal day job is nothing to do with software or medical devices

[Neomys Sapiens]

While I can't compete with Graybeard's haul, grabbing a Suhner divider good to 12.4GHz for 30.- was not bad either.

[cyclin_al]

Have you tried this?

Let's assume, the user account for your 7-years old is alice.

As user root:

passwd alice
(Enter a password twice, e.g. 1234)

This should do it, ignore the warnings.

I tried that among other things.  It enforced a strong password (not just a warning).
Other things included trying using the GUI option, GUI by the su and console by the su; all enforced a strong password.

I wonder if this is a change in 20.04 from the older versions?

@mnem,
So far I like that case.  The mesh seems to be good to keep cat & dog fur out of the interior.  Thanks for the note; I will keep an eye on it to keep the mesh clear so the cooling does not become a problem.  That reminds me to check the SSD temperature at some point.  The WD black SSD has a do not remove serial number sticker right where the ASRock B550 motherboard SSD heat sink makes contact.   At some point when I have spare time, I will have to compare it without the SSD heat sink installed.

[GreyWoolfe]

Third thing is common with consumer products where the wall wart is always rotated such that it blocks two receptacles on a power bar.  The advice is always to mount the device high up for better signal propagation, but the cord is never long enough.  Time to go shopping for an extension cord; I did not plan that one as well as the Ethernet cabling.

My 6U rack is mounted above the door into my office.  The power cable from the PDU is long enough to reach the UPS sitting on the desk on the same wall as the rack.  Router is mounted up near the ceiling about .5m from the PDU.  I hate short power cords on wall warts.  Cabling is never an issue, I have a box of cat 5e and I make my cables to length.  I have also made custom length extension cords.  Someone gave me a 100 ft cord that was jacked up at the ends.  Cut them off and I will go to the big box hardware store for universal male and female ends and make to length for permanent installs, never had any issues.  Same with 75\$\Omega\$ cable.  Nothing is never the length I need.  Making everything to length keeps Mrs GreyWoolfe happy as there is no rat's nest of extra length anything behind stuff as that sets her OCD off.  In her world, everything should not use cables and work magically.

[tggzzz]

Start 'em young. 

That’s a win. It’s the modern equivalent of the radio shack 160-in-1 I got that started all this 

If I was starting now, I'd go into the life science for the same reasons I started with electronics and computers.

So, where is the equivalent of the Philips EE-20 or that 160-in-1 kit? For that matter, what would they enable you to do now and in 10 years time?

Today's equivalent might be an Arduino kit of some kind?

I was really thinking of a life sciences kit.

"Igor's genetic engineering and self-surgery kit*"
Bonus: extra tentacles in this kit.

*suitable for children from 6 to 60

Many people have the fantasy of having to fly a plane after the pilot is disabled...

I've always had this weird desire to do an operation on myself, something a little more interesting than digging pus out of an ingrowing toenail when stuck on top of a mountain after a 1500ft vertical climb.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, which is no less insane.....

Back in my college days, I had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a girl at a dinner party that had some item of food stuck in her throat, she couldn't breathe and was panicking.  The funny thing is, I had no idea what a Heimlich maneuver was at the time, no first aid training, nothing.  I did it totally instinctively, wrapped my arms around her from behind and used her lungs as bellows to shoot out the stuck material - because it was clear to me she would die if nobody did anything.  It worked...   thank God.  Being the "hero" was scary as hell.  Only much later did I stop shaking.  Not a situation I would ever wish to be in again...   apparently, thousands of people die this way every year.

Three times in the past couple of decades I have woken up and found it extremely difficult to inhale and exhale. Thumping my chest didn't do anything, and the only thing I could think of was to throw my chest against the ground. Fortunately before I tried that and failed, breathing suddenly returned to normal.

My only guess was there was some mucous in my bronchi, and that suddenly it moved.

[Saskia]

did some walking on the beach.

And tried the new camera.
Still have to read TFM which has 644 pages. WTF ??!!!!

[bd139]

Well at least I found out this bastard oscillates wildly before I built it. That would not end well 

[BU508A]

Have you tried this?

Let's assume, the user account for your 7-years old is alice.

As user root:

passwd alice
(Enter a password twice, e.g. 1234)

This should do it, ignore the warnings.

I tried that among other things.  It enforced a strong password (not just a warning).
Other things included trying using the GUI option, GUI by the su and console by the su; all enforced a strong password.

I wonder if this is a change in 20.04 from the older versions?

I did some research and it seems, there are some changes.

Can you try this as user root?  Same credentials from above.

echo 'alice:1234' | chpasswd

Not sure if this is working:

echo "1234" | passwd --stdin alice

Edit:

If this all doesn't help, then I hope you are familiar with the vi. :-)
It seems, that the pam.d defines a minimum of 6 characters and a certain amount of entropy.
To get rid of this, one has to edit /etc/pam.d/common-password

In this file there is a line

Code: [Select]

password     [success=1 default=ignore]   pam_unix.so obscure sha512

This should be changed to

Code: [Select]

password     [success=1 default=ignore]   pam_unix.so minlen=4 sha512

This will disable the entropy check and will set the password length to a minimum of four.
It could be, that pam.d needs to be restarted after this change.

See also

man pam_unix

HTH

[McBryce]

Many people have the fantasy of having to fly a plane after the pilot is disabled...

I've always had this weird desire to do an operation on myself, something a little more interesting than digging pus out of an ingrowing toenail when stuck on top of a mountain after a 1500ft vertical climb.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, which is no less insane.....

You need some serious professional help!! But I'm still interested, how did the operation go?

McBryce.

[Cubdriver]

did some walking on the beach.

And tried the new camera.
Still have to read TFM which has 644 pages. WTF ??!!!!
(Attachment Link)

Nice shot!

-Pat