RoadRunner Returns To DNS Hijack Tactics

Back in early 2008 RoadRunner, the Time Warner/Bright House Networks ISP started a new policy of redirecting failed DNS queries to their “helpful” search and suggestions page. It was a hijacking tactic that was increasingly popular with ISPs at the time. It allowed them to monetize all those typos and non-existent domains that people were looking for. As if they weren’t making enough money off the service already.

Needless to say, most people were so enthralled with MySpace and YouTube that they didn’t know or care about it and just blindly accepted it. But, there were quite a few people savvy enough about the workings of the internet to realize what was happening and they didn’t care for it at all. Indeed, such a ruckus was raised that RoadRunner implemented an opt out page where you could go and opt out of the “fine service” that they were providing. This was enough to calm most folks and the world continued to turn.

Over the past week, I’ve been noticing a lag or delay on RoadRunner networks. Whenever I entered a new hostname into a browser or any other application, there was a new and very pronounce pause before the hostname was resolved. I wasn’t sure what was happening and frankly, my first thought was that spyware might be the cause, despite the very low likelihood. But then I got a couple of these pages in my browser.

After being annoyed by a couple of these redirects, I realized that the DNS hijacking service was enabled and that this was likely the slowdown or lag in hostname resolution that I had been noticing. So, I went to the opt out page and opted out. It was easy, the link was right there on the redirect page. And done.

Everything was fine again. That is, until the next day when the DNS hijacking was enabled again. Repeatedly, I opted out and every time, I was opted back in the next day. While it is possible that this unauthorized opting back in is a technical issue, I can’t help but think that this is RoadRunner’s new policy. A way to force users back into using the service and increasing their revenue.

Now, I do realize that there are ways of avoiding this issue. One can use a different DNS service or even setup their own DNS server. Indeed, it might come to this in my case. But, why must I pay for service to have it slowed by underhanded tactics intended to further increase the ISP’s revenue at the expense of my already under-delivered performance?

Net neutrality in the making folks.

Boxee Committing Suicide

Have you ever heard of Boxee? It’s a company that produces media center software. Through a joint effort with D-Link they are about to release a hardware bundle called Boxee Box.

Pre-orders for the, as yet to be released, Boxee Box are presently being accepted on Amazon for $229. Silly names aside, that’s a pretty gutsy or stupid move for Boxee. Especially since Apple has announced that their second generation Apple TV product, which offers much of (though not all of) the same functionality as Boxee Box, will go on sale very shortly for $99! Also, already shipping devices from Western Digital and Roku are also priced below Boxee Box.

But, don’t be too harsh with Boxee and D-Link about the bad pricing. They were probably too distracted by the atrocious design that they came up with for Boxee Box to be worried about naming and pricing.

Do these guys really believe that people want yet another set top device that does not fit in with the rest? One that is obtrusive and aesthetically displeasing in most living rooms? What else have they failed to consider? Does this thing have a fan that howls like a banshee too? Or does the Boxee logo light up in a brilliant and distracting LED green?

Sorry Boxee, you took a ‘me too’ product idea and applied abysmal execution. You and D-Link seem to be the only ones that don’t know where this will end.

Fish Cam

I’ve played around with closed circuit television(CCTV) and security solutions for a few years now. Nothing professional, just hobby and home security stuff. On a recent holiday trip to the tropics, I thought it would be entertaining to try some underwater CCTV. So, I bought a cheap Chinese underwater video camera from a company called Panvigor, via an eBay auction.

This small camera claims to be water tight and includes built in LED lights for night or low light use. It seems specifically designed for being towed behind a boat. Although I never tested it in this fashion, I suspect that it would waggle under tow and be nearly useless. Instead of towing it behind a boat, I opted to strap it onto a pole three feet below a dock for some quick and easy testing.

As you can see, the results were excellent. The above picture is a snapshot I took of the underwater image being displayed on a 46 inch LCD television inside the Codger’s holiday residence. The fish cam was very entertaining and was enjoyed by all who saw it. This particular image shows an inquisitive French grunt, that was probably about 3 inches long, mugging for the camera.

Considering the pleasure we got from this camera, it was well worth the price. But, all was not perfect with this camera. First, because of its 6 millimeter wide angle lens, objects need to be quite close in order to see them well and when they are close, they look huge. As is the case with my diminutive friend above.

The built in LED lights were a disappointment. There was no way to turn them off, even during the day and I suspect that the close proximity of the LEDs to the lens likely caused some washout of the picture color. Worse yet was that at night, it attracted a swarm of millions of near microscopic copepods directly in front of the lens.. These copepods showed up very well in the light as they swarmed the lens. At dusk, as they first started to arrive, the image would get “snowy” as the light reflected off of them. But as darkness set in and the copepod swarm reached its peak, the picture was a complete whiteout as they obscured the camera’s view completely. An external light, a few feet away, would have been much better for evening viewing.

Within a couple of days, algae was starting to grow on the camera’s lens. This caused a clouding of the image. The effect was nearly imperceptible due to the slowness of its onset. But, wiping down the lens with a wash cloth every three days would reveal a noticeably clear, sharp and colorful picture again.

Sadly, the time came for me to leave my seaside lair but, I left the camera behind for others to enjoy. I was informed that it lasted about three months before water finally penetrated its defenses and it stopped working. It was a great little toy and I’ll probably get another one for my next trip unless I find a better one at as reasonable a price.

openSuse 11.3 – Evolution 2.30

Update September 2012: This issue persists with openSuse 12.2 and Evolution 3.4.

I missed an appointment yesterday. Hardly Earth shattering but, it was annoying. How could it have happened, I had it on my Evolution calendar and I should have gotten a notification. Double checking my calendar to be sure, I noticed that there should have been several reminders that I had not seen. I decided to test the notification system by creating a test appointment a few minutes into the future. Unsurprisingly, the time came and went without any notification.

This launched an exploratory mission into why Evolution alarm notifications weren’t working. After a bit of wasted time, I found that the evolution-alarm-notify service was not running. I started it manually at the command line and up popped several alarm notifications. I thought I had figured it out. Apparently, evolution-alarm-notify must have died for some reason. Just to make sure that was all, I decided to restart the system to make sure that evolution-alarm-notify would come back up properly and I wouldn’t have this problem again in the future. But, it didn’t come back up. It didn’t even try to come back up. So, now I had to figure out how it was supposed to be started and where the problem was.

As it turns out, Evolution has changed the way that evolution-alarm-notify is started several times over the course of a few versions. Sometimes it was started as a service and sometimes it was started as a sub process of the main application, which would seem to be the most logical. But, with Evolution 2.30 the service is supposed to be started by the FreeDesktop XDG autostart facility. This means that a evolution-alarm-notify.desktop file in the autostart directory is supposed to kickoff the evolution-alarm-notify service when users login to their desktops.

Checking the /etc/xdg/autostart/ directory on my openSuse 11.3 system I saw that there was indeed such a file. But, upon examination of that file, I saw that KDE was excluded from the desktop environments that were supposed to run the service. I felt that this omission was odd and the lack of online complaints about it lead me to suspect that it was not a common or known issue with the distribution.

To test that theory, I ran a couple of new installs in virtual machines. I changed the installation options a little bit each time to see if there was a particular combination that was triggering the issue. But, the problem occurs no matter what you do. In all cases of new openSuse 11.3 installs, the setup of autostart for evolution-alarm-notify excludes KDE. It’s obviously a small bug but, I’m surprised that the issue hasn’t been more widely discovered. I thought that a lot of people were using Evolution.

Once you know what the problem is, the fix is fairly straight forward. You need to edit the file and enable autostart under KDE as well. The following bash shell commands will do this for you:

sudo vi /etc/xdg/autostart/evolution-alarm-notify.desktop

Then edit the file so that the OnlyShowIn line looks like it does below:

[Desktop Entry]
X-SuSE-translate=true
Type=Application
Name=Evolution Alarm Notify
Comment=Calendar event notifications
Icon=appointment-soon
Exec=evolution-alarm-notify
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;XFCE;KDE;
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla=GNOME
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=evolution
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Component=calendar
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Version=@VERSION@

Press the escape key. Then type
:wq
to save the file. Finally, restart the system and your Evolution alarms will work as expected.

openSuse 11.3 – Bit Me Again

I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. No matter how many times I’m disappointed by openSuse, I keep coming back to it for more punishment. My latest issues are with the latest version, openSuse 11.3.

Now, let’s be fair, overall this is a fine distribution. It is feature rich and it mostly just works. Some of my biggest issues with it can be attributed to taste, or the lack there of, and KDE 4. But, I’ll avoid those issues for now and concentrate on real issues.

Issue number one, immediately after installation, is the lack of any graphical means of configuring the video card and monitor settings. The openSuse folks decided that the Sax2 utility, formerly used to graphically configure the video card and monitor settings, wasn’t very good. Which was very true! So, they decided that it should be removed and perhaps it should have been. But, they couldn’t be bothered to provide any form of  replacement. This means that if Xorg doesn’t successfully detect and automatically configure all your video settings, which it most often does, then you must manually configure your settings in the obscure, convoluted and completely absent xorg.conf file.

That’s right, I said absent xorg.conf. The fact is that by default, xorg autdetect does not create any xorg.conf file so, you can’t even do a simple edit to at least get a VGA frame buffer session going, let alone a graphical configuration tool to do the job. With openSuse 11.3 it’s all or nothing. Either your system automatically sets up your video settings just right, or you are up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Now, the die hard xorg users will be quick to jump in and start saying that you simply need to run xorg -configure to create a basic xorg.conf file that you can then copy into the xorg directory and edit as you need. Simple!(?) But, the fact is that xorg.conf is somewhere that no human should ever have to go and, until the removal of Sax2, they mostly never had to. Now, with the release of openSuse 11.3, we advance backwards from graphical video tools to arcane text file configs that will make even the seasoned veteran weary. For the new user that encounters video problems, abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Distributing openSuse without a graphical means of setting up the video card and monitor is a regression that is as shameful as the feature free regression release that was/is KDE 4. Oops, I said I wouldn’t do that.

For those that refuse to give up, here is a link to a openSuse knowledge base article on how to setup a video card. I wish you the best of luck and promise that, if you get the video working properly, the rest of the distribution works well and you’ll likely enjoy it.

Ubuntu Server 10.04

I recently did an upgrade on an Ubuntu 8.04LTS server to the newer 10.04.1LTS (aka Lucid Lynx) server. The upgrade was fraught with issues from the very start. Below are ones I’ve seen so far.

1. Running the upgrade things seemed to progress normally and after a while of grinding the upgrade process would fail with complaints about openoffice.org-writer2latex.

Could not install the upgrades
Error during commit
'E:Couldn't configure pre-depend jre for openoffice.org-writer2latex, probably a dependency cycle.'
Restoring original system state "

The not entirely intuitive resolution to this problem was to first use the package manager to uninstall openoffice.org-writer2latex and its dependencies and rerun the upgrade. This worked for the most part and, after an error from the postgrey package, the upgrade process would complete.

2. The postgrey upgrade would not work. Sifting through the install output one finds the following errors:

db4.7_upgrade: Program version 4.7 doesn't match environment version 4.6
db4.7_upgrade: DB_ENV->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch

This error is due to the postgrey installation script explicitly calling the Berkeley db4.7_upgrade utility despite the postgrey.db file already being at version 4.8. The workaround, until the script I fixed, is to temporarily rename the files as below:

cd /usr/bin
mv db4.7_upgrade db4.7_upgrade.orig
ln -s db4.8_upgrade db4.7_upgrade
apt-get install postgrey
rm db4.7_upgrade
mv db4.7_upgrade.orig db4.7_upgrade

It is important to head the warning messages from the postgrey install as well. The older version of Ubuntu configured postgrey to listen on port 60000 and the corresponding postfix policy service configuration to send to port 60000. However, this new version of Ubuntu 10.04 sets postgrey to use port 10023 and it is up to the user to manually change the setting in the /etc/postfix/main.cf file from

check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:60000
to
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:10023

3. After restarting the server, I then see the following errors in the mail.log file:

postfix/tlsmgr[31109]: warning: request to update table btree:/var/spool/postfix/smtpd_scache in non-postfix directory /var/spool/postfix

This one is due to a change in who the process runs as resulting in a permissions issue when accessing the /var/spool/postfix directory.

The fix for this is to change the permissions on the /var/spool/postfix directory:
chown postfix /var/spool/postfix

I’m not getting codgerly about Ubuntu 10.04 just because of these few problems. Yes, it took a fair bit of time and it was a pain to figure out what was wrong and get it fixed. But, all things considered, these weren’t really big deals for a new version. No, the reason that I get codgerly about this stuff is that this is the newly released update 10.04.1. It should already have the fixes to all these stupid issues in it. These stupid issues have had bug reports, workarounds and in some cases patches for quite a while. In at least one case, the bug report was from March 2010, five months prior to the 10.04.1 release.
10.04.1 is a maintenance update to the original Ubuntu 10.04LTS release. For it to be released with stupid five month old bugs still outstanding is just ludicrous for a server product and an LTS one to boot.

Another Year Goes By.

Has it really been over a year since my last codgerly post? Indeed it has. The reason for my hiatus is simply that I’ve been to busy. But, I’ve got a little more time now and I’ve got some things to write about.

Ready or not, the Net Codger is back on the blog.