Category: Modern problems

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Ok Folks… This Ain’t Rocket Science!

angrychimp

This is one clearly destined for the annals of “how to really piss off your customer”

I’ve got someone for whom I put together a web site.

What I built is much nicer than the site they’d built using their web hosts “Web Design” package.

Honestly, the “web designer” used by their hosting site was barely functional. While it did produce a web site; Well you know the old saying about Shakespeare? The one  about 10,000 monkeys with typewriters and 1,000 years???

Lets just say what the web designer output was less than pretty. 

monkeyfangs

That my friend could make the site look decent at all is a tribute to a lot of patience and time spent on their part.

Had my friend NOT spent all that time and energy his website would have looked like a rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid had cobbled together some HTML. Or the great technologist Hillary Clinton, whichever floats your boat.

But that’s not the worst of it.

confusedmonkey

See, my friend was paying for this… Where things turned due South was when we tried to upload the site I built, to his host.

Turns out that even though he “Upgraded” the web hosting service wouldn’t allow FTP access. Additionally, they provided no way at all to simply upload HTML files. He asked again, and again he upgraded his service giving them MORE money and still FTP was denied.

hillary

FTP is one of the basic underpinnings of the internet. Virtually every operating system has the ability to FTP built right in. You have to specifically block this ability. In most modern Operating Systems, FTP access is blocked by default by the manufacturer, but during installation there is usually some question about enabling it, and a couple of other things. Many average consumers answer “No” or they skip the question. This leaves the service? protocol? (I honestly forget which FTP is classified as,) turned off and thus doesn’t leave a security hole open. If the consumer find they need FTP later, they can enable it. Often, if the customer has purchased an FTP front-end package, (Something that pretties up the service) during installation of the package, FTP is enabled.

Then I tried talking to his hosting site, and WOW! What an unmitigated cluster fuck!

Gandalfclusterfuck

I could log into the site as my friend, but when I tried making changes, I was sent to another site, and another site.

I’m not just talking about different webpages here, I’m talking about entirely different web sites all of which you have to log onto independently.

I started out logging into something called OptimalWebhosting.com. But that wasn’t the real host, they were called Wild West something something.com

But they weren’t the actual web builder people, and the web builder people weren’t the security people, and at one point godaddy.com popped up performing some function.

As we tried dealing with these people it became clear that there was no single entity in absolute control of his domain name.

Since there were so many people with fingers in the pie, nailing someone down for answers, getting something fixed, or getting anyone to take responsibility for anything, proved impossible.

Famouslastwords

My friend said he was completely tired of dealing with these people.

I said, “I think I can help.”

Famous last words!

I contacted my hosting service HostGator.com.

I’ve been very happy with them and their service over the past 3 years. In that time I’ve always been able to get ahold of someone that knew a lot more about some of this stuff than I do. I’ve always closed a chat, or hung up the phone thinking, “Dang! It’s really nice to talk to folks who are on the ball and have a ‘can do’ attitude.”

So I called them, I asked if my friend’s domain could be transferred to HostGator, how much, and how long?

The answer was, “Yes we can transfer the domain, it’ll cost $20 and once we have control of the domain name it usually takes only a few hours.”

I said, “Great! Clicked on the little transfer button, entered the domain name, and told my friend to authorize the transfer when he got an email about it.”

That was almost thirty days ago.

badserverroom

We went down the rabbit hole of politics, greed, stupidity, and really shitty corporate policy. 

Optimalwebhosting, A.K.A. Wild West Hosting, dragged its feet at every possible turn.

They refused to answer HostGator, they allowed transfer tokens to expire requiring that those tokens be recreated twice! They annoyed my friend and whined because he was leaving them, but wouldn’t expedite his leaving and wouldn’t correct the issue that was causing him to leave. 

They finally figured out that they wanted yet MORE money to provide FTP services that would allow him to upload a website. They also wanted to charge him by the web page!

So lets take a look at this business model shall we? 

14.95 Yearly domain registration.

75.00 Yearly hosting service using their web builder (rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid, HTML code.)

25.00 to upgrade site to have more web pages. (YET MORE, rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid, HTML code.)

Grand total… 114.95 to STILL have no ability to upload a custom site, and have crappy support spread across who knows how many different  companies.

Uh NO! This is not value for the money… this is death by a thousand cuts. This kind of billing structure makes you look like you’re running your business on retired or defective equipment that you’ve cobbled together out of dumpsters in Silicon Valley. 

As of today, it looks like the transfer may finally be nearing completion of ‘the domain transfer from hell’. I’m not holding my breath, I suspect that Wild West Hosting has something else up its collective sleeve. They’ve gotta have at least one more monkey wrench to toss into the works, it’s their nature.

Bottom line,

If you see Optimal Web Hosting, or Wild West Hosting offering really cheap domains and webhosting… 

RUN AWAY!

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One of these days Alice, POW! Right to the moon

oneofthesedays

No, I’m not advocating violence towards women. I’m just frustrated by the constraints of this future. When I was growing up, the Future was about everyone being closer.

Yet our technology is having the opposite effect. There’s far less human interaction today, than in my youth. 

The weird thing is that in our technological isolation, instead of allowing each of us more freedom of thought and expression, is often being used to enforce an homogeneity that is rather oppressive.

At least Ralph and Alice talked to each other in the same room.

The isolation was highlighted for me recently because I needed some help with a misbehaving bit of software. So I went to the manufacturers website looking for a phone number to give them a quick call.

I know,, I know, I obviously thought I was still living in the 20th Century, instead of the 21st Century. Phone numbers? You want to call us?

Villan1

Ohhhh No Mr. Bond, I expect you to email!

In reality, I ended up on a chat application. Thrilling! At the end of the Chat session, I got to answer a survey too!

After waiting for about 5 minutes, I ended up with a “Technician” in chat.

I explained my problem, He, She, It? put me on hold then came back after a couple more minutes. Then sent me a PDF file that was instructions concerning how to fix my problem. 

Okaaaay, the instructions were all about Windows, and the PDF had a link back to the website for the solutions to the Mac version of the problem. Unfortunately, their explanation of the cause of the problem was in no way true on my system. So I couldn’t follow the instructions to resolve it.

It was only an activation number that wasn’t being accepted. I figured there was something simple like wiping a configuration file then trying again. Apparently that was beyond this chat “Technician”. 

He/She/It,  couldn’t understand that I couldn’t execute their instructions because the initial condition didn’t exist. After being put on hold again (Hold on Chat?) He/She/It determined something was wrong. DUH!!!

Chats

After more pointless back and forth, I deleted the application, then re-installed it from the 6 original CDs. After the reinstallation, the application accepted my activation number without question.

It dawned on me that the Chat does a couple of things for companies.

The person only has to be able to type English. It doesn’t matter if they have a thick accent. They have to be able to figure out what document to send and then they hang up. That’s exactly what He/She/It did to me.

Once I confirmed that I’d gotten the PDF, He/She/It was gone.

southparkIndiansweat

Great way to save money and time for the corporation. The “Chatters” are in India or wherever. They’re probably being paid a 1.00 a day and after only 10 years are eligible to be considered by their company for an H1B1 Visa!

Lately, I’m feeling more and more on my own when it comes to problem solving. The really sad part is that I’m pretty high functioning when it comes to computer crap.

I hate to think of my poor mother chatting away with someone expecting help.

Welcome to the future.

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Funny what missing a Zero can do

 As regular readers know, we switched to a satellite internet service.

Recently I’ve also been fighting my way through some computer woes. That battle led me to doing a clean install of my operating system. Yep, I flushed everything, reformatted my drive, then reloaded the OS. No big deal, except that downloading fresh copies of every application I purchased, and all the security updates happened to be significantly larger than 10GB.

This too isn’t a big deal if you’ve got 100GB of upload and download per month.

Except that I don’t!

I gllanced over the shoulder of the other half, looked at a little graph, saw lots of green and promptly misread the number. in fairness, the data was represented in MB instead of GB so it wasn’t like i misread the difference between 10 and 100. It was the differnece between 9756.00 and 97560.00. Still bad, and God knows I wish the bank would make that kind of mistake, (in my favor) however it’s easy to do at a glance.

I told my computer to download everything! After all that’s what cloud services are for, right?

OOOOPPPSSS!

Now we get to find out what the internet service means by “Slows your service down” for the next 15 days. My bad!

Getting dirty looks from the other half .

Maybe it was a bit excessive to be sitting on the couch, watching Netflix at the same time I was blowing through our 10GB monthly allotment in 2 hours. Maybe I should have double checked the plan just once more before pressing “ALL“. It’s all data through the wire now…

I hear a certain woman in my head, “What does it matter at this point anyway?”

My computer is currently re-installing applications. I know I have the serial numbers for all those non-cloud apps somewhere around here. Its just going to be a challenge to locate them all. In the mean time, my iPad is substituting  for my computer.

This probably means that I’m going to make the mistakes in spelling that I complain about all the time. Perhaps, this is simply a case of not being able to beat them – so I’ve joined them.

Have a great day and think kindly of me as I serve my pennance in digital Hell.

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Formatting… Formatting… Backing up… Formatting… Backing up… wasting time…

HardDrive

Ya know, we have it pretty darn good.

Our disk drives are super dense, super fast, really small, and amazingly reliable.

Except when they’re not!

Because of their data density, sometimes it’s really hard to figure out that the problem you’re chasing is a slightly corrupted file that you only access once in a great while. 

Or that a subdirectory contains a group of corrupted files that you never access but that the system knows are problematic and is trying to fix instead of telling you, “Those files there are a steaming pile of crap… Sorry!”

Old HD

I’ve been chasing a subtle wonky problem around my network for a while. Most of the time I was able to minimize the issue to the point that I forgot about it.

With the recent changes to the network, I caused a serious disturbance in the force! The disturbance was bad enough that I wasn’t able to minimize the problem anymore, its just as well, I hate “now ya see ‘em… now you don’t issues.”

Now that I’ve had to truly address the problem, I think I’ve narrowed it down to a bad drive in one of my TimeCapsules. This is of course the drive with backups dating back 4 years. Thank goodness I had a copy of that backup on a portable drive or I’d have been really bummed out.

GreatDisturbance

I don’t know what the Time Capsule drive was actually doing, but I can tell you that it wasn’t backing up properly, and was sending all kinds of network broadcast messages.

Those millions of messages were impacting network performance across the board. Ironically, none of those messages actually said anything like, “Hey I’m in trouble please fix me!”

Sigh, there are times when I’d love to slap some engineers! Then again I can see that they’re trying to make things simple and user friendly. I just wish Apple, in all their endless forums would publish something like “For those of you that want to see all the errors… Set these parameters!”

It would make things a lot easier sometimes.

NewTimeCapsule

After a lot of troubleshooting, isolating the drive and now reformatting it, my network is operating at expected and acceptable speeds.  Why reformat it? I’m just curious if any part of it is salvageable. Its possible that there’s nothing wrong with the drive, just that the data was corrupted by a power failure or something.

An example of the difference in speed is that 1GB backed up every two hours (Before Isolating the drive). Now 1 GB backs up in just a few minutes. You don’t really think about speed across your network until you have over 300GB of data that you want to back up. Then suddenly its a really big deal. 

I can’t complain even if the Time Capsule drive is bad I’ve gotten 6 years out of it. That’s a pretty good run on a drive that’s running all the time. Now the question is do I trust the drive IF it passes reformatting? I can and have, begun backing up on another NAS drive. If the Time Capsule drive checks out OK do I dare trust it? 

The really funny part of all the is that I never used to have backups. Typically when I delete something, I’m very Hillary about it. I mean for that shit to stay gone. But there have been times since I started using Apples Time Machine that I’ve pulled things back from the abyss. 

It’s funny to me how quickly I adapt to and become reliant on new technology. 

Then there’s the other part of me that doesn’t like change. That part thinks, “If the Time Capsule drive is really dead, I wonder if I could simply replace it with a new drive?”

After all if everything else in the TimeCapsule is still working why toss the whole machine? Although, a nice shiny new Time Capsule would fit very well in my wiring closet.

Update

 I was overconfident. I thought I had figured the problem out and everything was working properly again.

I’ve tried all the tricks I know, I’ve tried unwrapping the ball of fur that is Time Machine backup. Still the backup system is behaving completely abnormally. I can get the system working properly for one backup, when the next scheduled backup starts things go to hell again.

This leaves me in an interesting situation.

I have other things to do besides do unpaid QA on Apple products. 

I have a couple of websites that I must protect until delivery for example. I’ve got my own writing that I’d like to do.

Since I’ve resolved all the other issues, plaguing my network and have come to the conclusion that regarding the backups, the common denominator is my primary computer, as I see it I have 3 basic choices.

1) Turn off Time Machine, check its functionality after each release of patches to OS X. I believe that this problem was introduced with the last round of patches as I’m seeing log entires denoting bugs and failures that I’ve never seen before. Even after backing out the patches, the backups still only work once. I can make sure that the critical data is moved to offline storage manually

2) Hope that the backups I have are in fact reliable. Then reformat and reinstall my system from the ground up, paying attention to the partition table. As I recently learned with a friends computer, there can be partition table issues that cause Time Machine to fail arbitrarily with nothing more than a cryptically unhelpful message. That message, of course leads you right down the rabbit hole of wasted time and incorrect diagnostics. I suspect this is the loop I’m in right now. Like my friend, my computer is running just dandy although when it’s trying to do a Time Machine backup it does run a tad warm.

3) Locate, research, and then install, and use a 3rd party piece of backup software and retire Time Machine altogether. Time Machine is very convenient, and when it works, it works well. There are however other solutions and these other solutions provide more flexibility without some of the risks I’ve read of inherent to Time Machine. For example; there are multiple reports of corrupted indexing, corrupting the underlying data. This results in a backup being completely useless.  Worse than useless in fact, because you don’t know the backup is trash, UNTIL you need to restore from it.

Perhaps a backup solution that permits cloning of the computer’s internal drive is a better solution. This means that there is always a bootable, functional copy of the system’s disk and it’s easy to check that it’s a working copy.

Perhaps a combination of all three solutions is the best way to protect my data. If I start with 3 then execute 2 then perhaps 1 won’t be necessary.

I’ve been at this off & on for the last week, its time to move on. 

For those who are searching for answers, My experience with the Apple Forums has been next to usless, except as a time waster.

Here are the symptoms I’m seeing.

“Preparing Backup” <- This step can go on for hours. During this time the console log shows that the backup drive is mounted but there may be no log activity for 20, 30, or some random number of minutes. When activity is again shown in the log it is almost but not always a message saying;

Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs | new event db |

This happens even if you initiate a backup right after a successful backup, meaning there should be no need to rescan the system hasn’t changed. 

process backupd[751] thread 36644 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU

This message makes sense because the whole system is very busy during indexing. But it shouldn’t be required to index the entire drive with each backup.

The following log is closer to normal but this log results in the system taking 12 hours to copy 12 GB. The new full disk 350GB backup to the same volume over the same connection only took six hours to begin with.

com.apple.backupd[751]: Starting automatic backup
com.apple.backupd[751]: Attempting to mount network destination URL: afp://UserName._afpovertcp._tcp.local./DriveName
com.apple.backupd[751]: Mounted network destination at mount point: /Volumes/DriveName using URL: afp://UserName._afpovertcp._tcp.local./DriveName
com.apple.backupd[751]: Disk image /Volumes/DriveName/ComputerName.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups
com.apple.backupd[751]: Backing up to /dev/disk4s2: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb
com.apple.backupd[751]: Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Macintosh HD
com.apple.backupd[751]: Waiting for index to be ready (100)
com.apple.backupd[751]: Deep event scan at path:/ reason:must scan subdirs|new event db|
com.apple.backupd[751]: Reading cached event database from: /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/ComputerName/2015-04-02-074526.inProgress/15A09E54-6451-4E09-A947-4F7EBAF8DE21/.CFB31849-81AA-376E-BE44-9BE66ECE17D2.eventdb
com.apple.backupd[751]: Using cached disk scan
com.apple.backupd[751]: Saved event cache at /Volumes/Time Machine Backups/Backups.backupdb/ComputerName/2015-04-02-074526.inProgress/38C9D5E1-C5B6-4F3F-BB63-19C909718795/.CFB31849-81AA-376E-BE44-9BE66ECE17D2.eventdb
com.apple.backupd[751]: Not using file event preflight for Macintosh HD
com.apple.backupd[751]: Found 415344 files (11.39 GB) needing backup
com.apple.backupd[751]: 14.63 GB required (including padding), 1.69 TB available
com.apple.backupd[751]: Copied 96408 items (1.03 GB) from volume Macintosh HD. Linked 335719.
kernel[0]: process backupd[751] thread 36644 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 61%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 548.276287 seconds, (241.274677 user, 307.001610 system) ledger info: balance: 90003836101 credit: 536400616669 debit: 446396780568 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 147338040650 
spindump[444]: Saved cpu_resource.diag report for backupd version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/backupd_2015-04-02-082002_ComputerName.cpu_resource.diag
 

 I have no answers for any of you looking to find out what happened to your nice reliable Time Machine backup. I can only say that since the last patch mine has been completely screwed. 

The event logs look pretty much the same and the computers behavior is the same, if I’m backing up to a network attached drive or a locally attached external drive.

Virus scans show no issues, Malware scan shows no issues.  Deleting and forcing a rebuild of spotlight indexes on all drives does not resolve the problem.

Disk Repair indicates that the internal drive and external drives are healthy. I’ve run the repair disk option on all drives, reformatted external drives, and am confident that whatever the problem is, it is not the external drives.

Everything points back to this particular system which has led me to the three options.

One more point of interest is this. 

I have not been able to permanently exclude the backup drives from spotlight indexing. I’ve tried via Terminal and via the spotlight application in System Preferences.

The exclusions are deleted after a reboot.

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I’ve really become suspicious

NewImage

In my on-going search for a permanent job, I’ve had some very negative experiences.

In some cases, those experiences were due to my own failings, in other cases I, like a lot of the aging boomers got victimized.

As a result, I’m always suspicious of headhunters.

My experience with placement personnel has been universally negative over the past decade. Even within the headhunters, there are gradations of suspicion.

For example:

My suspicion is heightened when the headhunter is from well out of the local area.

Why would a company in California hire a headhunting agency in New Jersey?

Hunting party

Based on past experiences and lots of wasted time, I’m a tad more suspicious when a New Jersey based headhunter has an obviously Indian name and they’re telling me about a temporary opportunity 1200 miles away from my current location.

How well does this person know the job market or geography?

The odds are they don’t. Often these folks are actually in India and the address they’ve given in New Jersey is essentially an empty office suite.

This is not to say that American Headhunters don’t do the same thing.

Recently, I drove to Huntington Beach to personally hand my resume to someone. The office was actually an executive suite with a receptionist who told me flat out, she’d never seen anyone from the company I’d come to see.

I’m likely to flush an email instantly if it’s obvious that the headhunter didn’t read my resume, or if their email is rife with typos, or worse yet, obvious and incorrectly copied HTML

I realize that I may be tossing out viable leads, but from the old school perspective; “If you can’t be bothered to at least look at your work before you send it out to the world, you can’t be very diligent in negotiation for salary on my behalf.”

Lets be honest here. Technically, a headhunter is your agent. If they look like shit in their correspondence or can’t communicate, YOU’RE going to look like shit too

If a headhunter references their “database” but I’ve never done business with them, heard of their company, or the email address they’re using is very old, I’m very suspicious.

Beginning any relationship with a lie is a bad idea. Beginning a business relationship with lies is especially bad. Why don’t they tell you something like “I saw your resume on Dice, or Monster, or LinkedIn.” At least then I’d know what information they’d been privy to and might not be quite as circumspect. I’ve had way too many experiences where I spend the time, answer their questions, and then… The sound of one hand clapping.

In my case, I go right to the memory of working very hard with a headhunter daily, I was writing letters and tweaking my resume for weeks on end, for various jobs, only to discover that I was doing the headhunter’s job and he was using my letters and chunks of my resume to sell other candidates.

Lamprey

The parasite would have continued to bleed me for who knows how long except that I was at an interview and the interviewer asked if I used aliases.

When I said, “No” he presented me with a poorly edited version of my resume with someone else’s name on it, and one of the cover letters I’d written.

Needless to say nobody got the job. The headhunter in question and his company, were barred from submitting candidates. I noticed recently that headhunters office was for lease.

The point to all of this is that I’m getting interest in my online profile, but I’m very curious as to why all that interest is from companies outside of California.

Not that leaving California is necessarily a problem, but these are for positions within California. Why aren’t local headhunters working these positions?

The real problem is,how do you know if these headhunters and the positions they offer are real, or if these positions are bogus, designed to get you to turn over information “necessary to get the job” that is really being given to identity thieves.

At the risk of sounding like a luddite… 

I don’t like this new internet job thingy. I don’t like it one little bit!

Here’s an update.

After 5 headhunters contacting me, one of them twice. Then me following up with them politely and providing the information that they requested yet again…

…The sound of one hand clapping. 

I checked these companies out to the best of my ability. I did due diligence but lets face it anyone can make a web page and have a phone number forwarded to a cell phone.

Another colossal waste of time. Time I might add that I don’t have to waste.