At&t 2Wire Gateway

I have to delete a previous post as the rant was off the target: I thought that at&t might be blocking ports entering my home. But the real problem turns out to be in the 2Wire gateway device -- more specifically, in its firewall settings. I forgot to check if my previous setting was changed. But anyway, resetting its firewall to expose the next router as a DMZ device -- which is where my port forwardings are configured -- has solved the problem.

At&t may still be to blame, as the firewall configuration change could not have happened by itself, but could have been the result of firmware upgrade in the gateway, or something like that.

Password? What password?

This morning I mindlessly did an iOS upgrade -- I came into work, plugged my iPhone to charge it; iTunes popped up and prompted me to do some upgrade. I haven't had my morning coffee yet, so I just clicked OK. When I realized it was upgrading my phone, the process was already well under way. So I decided to let it go ahead -- I am now regretting that (non-)decision.

I was working on my PC doing whatever I was supposed to do. Then this screen popped up:

I thought, hmmm.... What does that mean? Was the upgrade completed? Or did it fail?

At that point, it didn't seem that there was anything else I could do. So, I went along. Then I got this:

That made me a bit nervous. If this warning came earlier, I might have stopped the upgrade even not being fully awake. But at this point, what could I do? So I hit Restore and Update.

Now that's strange! I didn't see it doing the backup. So I definitely did not set a password on the backup. I tried my Apple account password, my Windows password, etc. It just kept giving me the same password ... was incorrect message.

So I googled iPhone upgrade backup password. This one came up on top of the result:

To put it mildly, I have never liked Apple products. Now this is pushing my dislike to a level of hatred.

Planview

As a grumpy old software engineer, I complain about other people's software a lot, as shown in this blog. But I must say, Planview has to be on top of the pile for being arrogant, stupid and time-wasting. I am no management expert -- I am not even a manager, but this message is a bit too much -- I don't know what you think.

The problem is caused by me closing the lid on my laptop before I finished what I was doing. When I came back to it, the session apparently timed out. I clicked on something and was shown this message implying that I might be treated as a criminal -- One would expect that a leader in an industry could at least be able to tell a simple timed out session from a criminal attack.

As for what I was doing, well -- I don't even want to go there. Here is my take on Planview: If your company is planning to implement this software and you have any say in that decision process at all, fight against it with all you have got. You will thank yourself down the road if you still work for the same organization.

They are Branded as Windows

They are branded as Windows -- in fact, they have been for years. But this is how you know, it's just holes in the wall.

Pain with Windows Continues

I admit that I seriously lack in-depth knowledge of Microsoft Windows, but this one still looks ridiculous never-the-less.

I am trying to hook up a ViewSonic gTablet to a Windows XP machine to load a ROM. Upon plug in the USB cable, Windows recognized the new device and popped up the Found New Hardware Wizard. All seems smooth sailing, until the wizard seems to stuck at copying a file.

Of course, when I check the destination folder, the file is there. The copying is already done but the Wizard just sits there twiddling its thumb, forever and ever. I can't even cancel it as the buttons are all greyed out. It only goes away and declares that it has finished installing the software for the device when I unplug the USB cable or power off the device.

Yet, when I plug the device back in, it is not functioning properly as an APX device. The properties dialog box in the Windows Device Manager says that "No drivers are installed for this device."

So the next thing I try is to remove the device from the Device Manager. Windows stuck again:

I guess I am going to try Linux.

[Edit 2012-11-25] -- I thought if Linux was to help, I would write another post titled "Linux to the Rescue" or something. But Linux made it so easy which made me question myself as why I started with Windows in the first place -- Possibly because most of the how-to type articles mention Windows. Well, anyway, I found this article on SlateDroid.com and followed its instructions to nvflash the tablet, which is basically, plug in the device using a mini USB cable, download nvflash, download the device image you want to install on the device and run the nvflash script -- not worth writing another post.

Windows Registry is Evil

I have heard from colleagues who worked in end user support, that Windows registry was a source for many problems. But this one that just bit me int he rear is evil.

I have an old Asus EeePC running Windows XP. It was setup initially as a box to automatically logon. I wanted to give it to my kid to carry around. So I needed to turn off the auto logon. Googling "Windows XP auto logon", I found this Microsoft article titled "How to turn on automatic logon in Windows XP". So I went ahead and found the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon". I then removed the DefaultUserName entry, assuming that would be enough to disable auto logon.

Upon reboot, however, Windows popped up an error message which is quickly covered with the Windows startup screen. It seemed to just hang there. The mouse cursor moved, but Ctrl-Alt-Del did not do anything. I rebooted it a couple of times by pressing on the power button. I got distracted for a while and come back to find Windows actually timed out from whatever it was doing.

One wouldn't have thought Windows would behave like that with removing one single value from the registry. But I guess this just shows that I have not messed around in the Windows registry enough.

I ended up downloading the Microsoft Fixit program in the How to page linked above. That did work to turn off auto logon for me. Otherwise, I guess I would have to break out my Windows XP CD, go into recovery console mode, find a registry backup and restore it. That would have been the last straw to break it for me to replace this Windows installation with Linux.

Sharing the Pain from IE

I just complained to a colleague, after he spent some time helping me with an issue in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, that Microsoft wanted to conquer the world. They did it, but with whole truck loads of manure, piled up high in everybody's backyard. Now we are left to clean up all that smelly stuff.

The issue is that, the hospital has some legacy applications that run only on IE. We finally got to IE8 not too long ago after a relatively brief encounter with IE7, which was after a long tiring adventure with IE6. But some applications still require IE7. So the standard issue browser on everyone's desktop is IE8 running in IE7 compatibility mode. Web based applications that I have worked on usually are used by technical people so I usually could care less if something works in IE or not.

The latest project involves a dashboard for the non-techies, including executives, which means we are not allowed to bring a tool not sanctioned by the enterprise, such as Firefox. Fortunately, we have another colleague who has dealt with IE quite extensively. He provided information that was priceless to us, with a caveat: The tricks he gave us may or may not work. At least he had not been able to get them all to work.

The one trick is to force IE8 to render HTML as IE8, rather than in IE7 compatibility mode. There are three ways to do that:

1. Change Compatibility View Settings in IE8: That function is listed in Tools menu. One just needs to check off the Display Intranet sites in Compatibility View.
2. Add a meta tag in the HTML document head part:
   <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>
3. Add an item in the HTTP response header: x-ua-compatible: IE=Edge

#1 is a non-starter because it requires manually configuring the browser.

#2 worked for my colleague right away in one of his applications. So he gave me the information to try out in my code.

It didn't work!

After a number of frustrating trials, every single time clearing IE8 cache, closing the browser, open the browser again and checking the rendering mode, etc., with no luck whatsoever, we decided to try #3.

That worked.

At this point, I am too lazy to bother with the changes in previous trials. So I still don't know if #3 alone or the a combination of #2 and #3 made it work. I am just glad that it works.

web2py and apache2/mod_python

Finally got it to work!

web2py is an open source Python based web application framework. I had the fun of setting one up on a SuSE ELS 11.1 server. Not wanting to go outside the distribution to alert the server administrative team, I stayed with what are available in the repository, which does not have the WSGI module. So I went with the Python module for Apache.

There is a file named modpythonhandler.py in the top folder of web2py installation, with sample configuration in it. But following that I get an "invalid request" message from accessing web2py. I searched on Google for setting up web2py with mod_python, but it still took me some time and trials to get it right. So here is what I have learned from this experience.

One thing is to setup access to the static files (CSS, JavaScripts, etc.):

AliasMatch ^/([^/]+)/static/(.+)$ /path/to/web2py/applications/$1/static/$2

That turns request for welcome/static/js/jquery.js to the actual path to that file, which is usually in the applications subfolder.

Next, setup the handler for web2py -- All client requests pass through the handler, except for the static files:

SetHandler python-program PythonHandler web2py_modpython PythonPath "sys.path+['/path/to/web2py']"
AllowOverride FileInfo Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks Order Allow,Deny Allow from all

Next, the static files:

SetHandler None Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 hour" Order Allow,Deny Allow from all

Files in all the static/ subfolders should be handled by Apache directly.

The content of the web2py_modpython.py file (the Python handler):

from mod_python import apacheimport modpythonhandler
def handler(req):    req.subprocess_env['PATH_INFO'] = '/welcome/default/index'    return modpythonhandler.handler(req)

The end.

VPN in Ubuntu and Upgrading to 12.10, Quantal Quetzal

The latest release of Ubuntu hit the news a couple of days ago. I have been hesitant upgrading for some time as I have become less enthusiastic about new operating system features since moving away from system level development.

My experiences following Ubuntu has been that, every time a new release comes out, some functions are broken. Over time, bugs get reported, updates released and broken functions repaired. It has been a great OS for years, although Unity has not been my favorite. Between Gnome and KDE, I have always liked Gnome better, so I have stayed with Ubuntu, using it on my desktop, my netbook, and home server.

After reading about the 12.10 release for a few days, I decided to upgrade my desktop. The upgrade went pretty smooth besides taking a while. I went the command line route as that was easier for me.

Before I started the upgrade process, I had to enable the upgrade to a non-long-term-support (LTS) release -- Ubuntu does 2 release every year, one in April and one in October, which is where the release numbers like 10.04 and 12.10 come from. The latest release, 12.10, means it is released in October 2012. I forgot the file containing that option, so I started the System Tools » Administration » Update Manager, went to Settings and change the Notify me of a new Ubuntu version option from For long-term support versions to For any new version.

Then in a terminal window, I did a do-release-upgrade. That's pretty much it -- all I had to do after than was answering a few questions about new configuration files -- Since I haven't done much customization, I only had to answer y.

The upgrade process kept all my personalizations, including my choice of Gnome 3 and background images, etc.

But then almost immediately after reboot into 12.10, I noticed something not working: My VPN to work. It is a Cisco AnyConnect setup. The Network Manager isn't much help -- it just says connection failed. In syslog, this one message looks quite suspicious: Failed to open tun device: Permission denied -- I checked /dev/net/tun, I should already have read and write access to it per group permissions. Only by granting world read/write access to the tun device seems to make VPN work -- That seems rather strange. But that's a story for another day.

Problem Connecting an XP VBox to WHS

The Acer EasyStore AH340 is a nice little headless box running Windows Home Server. It has 4 SATA hard drive bays, a gigabit Ethernet, a few USB ports and an expansion slot. With an Intel Atom CPU, it is obviously not a power computer. But it serves the purpose of backing up home PCs well. But the bad news is that Acer has discontinued the product line.

Anyway, my AH340 currently is backing up a Windows XP laptop from work. But I am having much trouble trying to connect an XP virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox inside my Ubuntu desktop.

After connecting from the VBox to HTTP port 55000 on the AH340, I downloaded the WHSConnectorInstall.exe software. Starts it. It goes looking for the server on the network:

It seems to find it OK and start to download software:

But that's as far as it gets:

There isn't really much help in troubleshooting. I searched online but did not find anyone else with the exact same problem.

Wireshark came to the rescue. It turns out that the WHS connector installer program changes the Windows hosts file after it finds the home server. Because the XP VM network adaptor is configured in NAT mode, the home server's address is translated to 10.0.0.2 by VirtualBox.

After changing the VM's network interface to Bridged mode, everything works.