Category: Computers

Alles Lockenspeepers!

The IBM 1620 computer at Northfield Highschool, where I first learned to program, had a version of a classic warning to not break the machine, written in humorous pseudo-German.

There are multiple documented versions online, and I don’t have a legible photo of the exact version of the one on ours; I’m trying to come reasonably close to reconstructing it between those references and my memory.

This is about how I remember it:

Achtung! Alles Lockenspeepers!

Das Computenmachine is nicht fűr gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der Springenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit Spitzensparken. Ist nicht fűr gewerken by das Dumbkopfen. Da rubberneckin Sightseeren keepen hands in das Pockets; relaxen und watchen das Blinkenlights.

Anybody from then and there want to contribute to my memory? Even if you don’t have a photo, if you remember it differently I’d be interested in knowing. (There are lots of well-documented versions, all a bit different, from around the globe, but I’m asking about that specific version, not others.)

Why German? Well, perhaps because the Germans were a big deal in science around WWII (which, remember, was closer in time to when I was in highschool than that time is to today). Perhaps because German as formally deployed is ponderous enough that this kind of fractured German is inherently funny. Perhaps because of the humorously incompetent German’s in Hogan’s Heroes on TV.

File Server Cooling and Power Refinement

Temporary placement of a fan in front of the internal drive bay resolved the heat problems (which I’ve let run for over a year; stupid me).

When I also had to replace the power supply (it’s suspect in the lockups, not yet proven) I removed the temporary fan (mounted with double-sided tape), and had it come apart in my hands and stop spinning when powered (it was old, it was a test). (Another lockup factor is that it wasn’t getting assigned the right IP address; that made it look like it booted locked, until I logged in from the console.)

And the new modular power supply (200 watts bigger than the old) required me to replace and hence re-route all the power cables. So I messed with the rest of the cables as well (6 flat SATA cables can block some air!).

Temps are back within bounds–but not as good as before, there are two drives up close to 40. Not sure what the difference is from the test state! These darned analog, even physical, things are a lot of trouble.

  • Heat buildup on three boot tries; temporary good state at the left, new tolerable state at the right.
  • New power supply, 200 watts stronger than old, not old, and also more efficient.
  • Parts for the new fan mounting attempt, plus misc. wiring.
  • Fan, ready to go into case.
  • The USB cable adapter (motherboard to case front panel) showed some tendency to come unplugged, so I kludged that up pretty thoroughly.
  • All the busy power and signal cabling up in that corner of the motherboard. Now arranged so there’s *some* room for airflow to the internal drive stack.
  • CPU (center) and 2 chassis fan connections, routed out of the way of power connectors and bundled (above right, to the side of the fan there).
  • From the bottom, front panel cables now routed down there rather than on top of the motherboard. Also power and SATA to the internal drive stack are back here.
  • Back of the switch and LED cables coming in from the front panel to the motherboard.
  • Fan installed in front of internal drive stack (and all other cables going through there removed or pushed aside).
  • Fan in place, showing correct airflow. 4 of the SATA ports are on the motherboard at top left.
  • Space between the power supply and the internal drive stack is at a premium, and kind of messy, even without the fan in place. All the case cables pass through here as well, and connect to the motherboard at that corner. The 6 SATA ports are just in from there. Crowded.
  • All the busy power and signal cabling up in that corner of the motherboard. Now arranged so there’s *some* room for airflow to the internal drive stack.
  • SATA to hot-swap adapter bay now routed underneath (and bundled in a stack of 4).

The order of the gallery is kind of messy. First the photos I uploaded were added in reverse order, and then the light table on which I can drag them to arrange the order is a bit weird, and finally there’s no way short of going into edit mode to see the photo big enough to be sure what it is. So after a while I got annoyed and stopped improving it.

Mobile Device Connectivity Speed

Mostly grousing about my specific situations.

Turns out my phone (LG G4) connects to my home WIFI at around 50 Mb/sec; pretty pitiful (and I don’t know how to get the phone to tell me what speed it connected at; that’s measured at Ookla; but my household WiFi is enough faster than that that it’s going to be reasonably accurate). In theory I should be able to get 20 times that, but I think the phone doesn’t support high enough WiFi specs.

Then, when I turn on VPN (OpenVPN, TUN, TCP) terminating at my router, that drops again, to maybe 7 Mb/sec.  However, I can still get that 7Mb/sec from the local library, which blocks most types of VPN connection (no idea why; but this configuration plus using port 443 makes it look essentially identical to an HTTPS browser connection, so few people block it). (The default VPN on the phone is faster, 30 Mb/sec or some such, but using 40-bit encryption or something really embarrassing like that. That one is also blocked at the library.)

Even the laptop connect seems slow; 300 Mb/sec, on a brand-new laptop that says it supports 801.11ac and an ASUS RT-AC66U which says it supports AC.  (This is sitting in the same room with, or on the opposite side of the wall from, where the WiFi hangs on the wall.)  For that matter the laptops reports an AC connection. I’ve ended up buying an Amazon dongle that plugs into the USB-C port and gives me three conventional USB 3.1 ports and a gigabit Ethernet port.

 

Cygwin protection issues accessing SAMBA shares

I’ve posted about my instance of this to the Cygwin mailing before, years ago and again just now, and read a lot of what’s online about it. I’ve also asked people over in the FreeNAS community (and gotten basicaly the same answer). Basically everything I can find says that the information is here.

What’s there doesn’t work for me. Across many Cygwin installs on multiple windows versions (at least 7 and 10) on at least 4 different hardware platforms. Including one work computer accessing a Synology server, so *completely* different software on the server side (dev network at work, no Active Directory there, so it’s just like home, local logons only).

The Samba server at home is a FreeNAS box. It’s *not* joined to any domain, nor are the windows boxes (it’s at home, I have no AD server, it’s all local logons). Currently running FreeNAS 11.1 U5, if it matters (latest), which seems to be running samba version 4.7.0-GIT-de2f31198c7-FreeNAS.

Details will be from my Windows 10 desktop, where I did a clean install of Cygwin-64 last night; it identifies itself (uname -a) as CYGWIN_NT-10.0 DDB4 2.10.0(0.325/5/3) 2018-02-02 15:16 x86_64 Cygwin.

This box has accessed this server (multiple FreeNAS and hence Samba servers over the years) as both Windows 7 and windows 10. It works fine in windows, I can adjust file security through the Windows explorer dialogs, etc. (My desktop computers, or my last 3 or 4 desktop coumpters really, running windows and Cygwin in some version, has accessed a file server via CIFS for most of my file access since about 2006; that fileserver has been Solaris with ZFS and then FreeNAS with ZFS. I’ve also had at least three laptops configured to use this server and having Cygwin, and they all behaved the same as the desktop at that moment. I started having protection problems when Cygwin made the changes described in the link above.)

Cygwin works fine on locally-hosted files (not that I have many; a small SSD for software installation, plus external drives I may attach from time to time, everything important lives on the fileserver). The protections Cygwin shows for files on the NAS look like what I will get if the underlying problem *is* something related to the ntsec article above. That kinda gives me hope that I’m just doing something wrong that I’m unable to spot.

On the FreeNAS box, user ddb (uid 1001) owns the files in question:

[root@fsfs /mnt/zp1/ddb/Documents/Recipes]# id ddb uid=1001(ddb) gid=1001(ddb) groups=1001(ddb),0(wheel),20(staff),1004(public),1007(music),1712(bdr)
[root@fsfs /mnt/zp1/ddb/Documents/Recipes]# ls -l S*
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 9605 May 30 2004 Sacher.asc
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 9600 May 30 2004 Sacher.doc
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 4867 May 30 2004 Salsa.asc
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 4864 May 30 2004 Salsa.doc
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 2181 May 30 2004 Shrmpstr.asc
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 2176 May 30 2004 Shrmpstr.doc
-rwxrwxr-x+ 1 ddb ddb 20841 Dec 4 2012 Spaghetti.odt

Locally, it’s mapped as Windows drive P: (at the ‘Documents’ level in the above path), but also directly accessible as //fsfs/ddb/Documents.

$ id
uid=197612(ddb) gid=545(Users) groups=545(Users),197121(None),197613(fsfsddb),4(INTERACTIVE),66049(CONSOLE LOGON),11(Authenticated Users),15(This Organization),113(Local account),66048(LOCAL),262154(NTLM Authentication),401408(Medium Mandatory Level)

$ ls -l /cygdrive/p/Recipes/S*
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 9.7k May 30 2004 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Sacher.asc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 9.6k May 30 2004 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Sacher.doc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 4.9k May 30 2004 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Salsa.asc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 4.9k May 30 2004 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Salsa.doc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 2.2k May 30 2004 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Shrmpstr.asc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 2.2k May 30 2004 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Shrmpstr.doc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 21k Dec 4 2012 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/Spaghetti.odt

$ ls -l //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/S*
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 9.7k May 30 2004 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Sacher.asc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 9.6k May 30 2004 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Sacher.doc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 4.9k May 30 2004 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Salsa.asc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 4.9k May 30 2004 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Salsa.doc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 2.2k May 30 2004 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Shrmpstr.asc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 2.2k May 30 2004 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Shrmpstr.doc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 21k Dec 4 2012 //fsfs/ddb/Documents/Recipes/Spaghetti.odt

That “Unknown_User” is the signature of this problem, right?

And I can create a file, and read it, but not replace it:

$ echo testing > /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt

$ ls -l /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt
----r--r-- 1 Unknown+User Unix_Group+1001 8 Jun 16 13:08 /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt

$ echo replace the file > /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt
-bash: /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt: Permission denied

(note no indication that there is an ACL; which is compatible with the following)

$ getfacl /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt
# file: /cygdrive/p/Recipes/test001.txt
# owner: Unknown+User
# group: Unix_Group+1001
user::---
group::r--
other:r--

 

My Cygwin setup doesn’t have /etc/passwd or /etc/groups

$ ls /etc/passwd
/usr/bin/ls: cannot access '/etc/passwd': No such file or directory
$ ls /etc/group
/usr/bin/ls: cannot access '/etc/group': No such file or directory
$ ls /etc/groups
/usr/bin/ls: cannot access '/etc/groups': No such file or directory

(Wasn’t absolutely sure of my memory whether group was plural or not 🙁 ; but neither one exists.)

I have configured /etc/nsswitch as I believe is directed (everything left defaults, except change db_gecos to schema “desc”):

$ cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
# /etc/nsswitch.conf
#
# This file is read once by the first process in a Cygwin process tree.
# To pick up changes, restart all Cygwin processes. For a description
# see https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-mapping-nsswitch
#
# Defaults:
# passwd: files db
# group: files db
# db_enum: cache builtin
# db_home: /home/%U
# db_shell: /bin/bash
# db_gecos: <empty>

db_gecos: desc

$

I have configured the user comment for me, user ddb, in SAM, via the net user command, to have the xml-like Cygwin data in the comment:

$ net user ddb
User name ddb
Full Name David Dyer-Bennet
Comment <cygwin unix="1001" group="Users" />
User's comment
Country/region code 000 (System Default)
Account active Yes
Account expires Never

Password last set 6/2/2017 11:17:13 PM
Password expires Never
Password changeable 6/2/2017 11:17:13 PM
Password required Yes
User may change password Yes

Workstations allowed All
Logon script
User profile
Home directory
Last logon 6/16/2018 12:26:50 PM

Logon hours allowed All

Local Group Memberships *Administrators *fsfsddb
*Users
Global Group memberships *None
The command completed successfully.

And I have also done that for the group:

$ net localgroup Users
Alias name Users
Comment <cygwin unix="1001" />

Members

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
admin
ddb
localddb
NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users
NT AUTHORITY\INTERACTIVE
The command completed successfully.

And I have rebooted the entire Windows box more than once since I last changed anything in the Cygwin config, so the config shown should be in effect when Cygwin produced the output posted above.

(I’ve tried what seems like a million things over the years, but this is the mainline approach to the problem as described in the NTSEC article, and I went through *very* carefully last night to do everything I found in the article about how I was supposed to do it, and documented all the things I’ve done to produce this email).

So…HELP! I feel like this is supposed to be an understood problem, and that I have *done* everything the main article says I’m supposed to do — and it hasn’t helped. Did I miss a step or something? Any ideas? I have this across multiple software versions on both sides and multiple hardware platforms and installations; it’s not some one-time thing.

Blast From The Past!

The code from the main project I worked on out in Marlboro (for Digital Equipment Corporation Large Computer Software Engineering) is up on the web!

This proves that I really have been using source control systems since the 1980s (I think this was DEC CMS), and that I wrote BLISS code, and that I wrote many metric fuck-tons of comments.

Possibly the weirdest bit is this floating-point number conversion code. It handles pdp-11/vax 32 and 64 bit floating point, and PDP-10 36 and 72 bit floating point, and can convert anything to anything (within format limitations).  It’s at http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/bb-r775d-bm_tops20_ks_upd_4/01/sources/dixfp.bli.html

Although the declaration of the character tables for various character sets might be a runner-up.  (Bliss had far and away the most powerful macro facilities of any language I’ve ever used.)