Official Kiwifarms IT Venting thread - For when a 2 minute problem requires a 5 hour solution

[Penis]

Linux doesn't need drivers for this stuff. As long as the device and the buttons are recognized and work in X, you can map them however you want with onboard tools. You can even do weird shit like map key combinations to a button like Ctrl+Shift+A for example. Or just shift and/or ctrl. Or have two keyboards connected to the same computer and only on keyboard number two have WASD move the mouse cursor. There are no limits.

My work machine is, unfortunately, a windows machine. I needed the settings in the mouse to be commit to nonvolatile storage. However, even with xmodmap or using gnome-tweaks, I'd still need to reprogram the mouse to turn the DPI cycling button into something useful.

This doesn't work with wayland because wayland is garbage.

Wayland is garbage with anything Nvidia, but its pretty stable if you use an AMD card. I was forced to switch to Wayland recently. There is some obnoxious bug with x11 that causes the entire GUI to freeze if you use two keyboards at the same time. (In this context, buttons on a programmable mouse counts as an additional keyboard). As you could imagine, this makes gaming extremely annoying.

Eventually, the solution I settled on was to drop $400 on a new AMD card, and ditch Nvidia all together. Which, too be honest, I'm happy I did. Gaming performance immediately became more stable. For whatever reason, I couldn't push 144hz on my 3060ti, even though my monitor supported it. Switch over to AMD... Everything runs like butter.

The higher VRAM was nice as well, to run LLMs locally. Devstral is a badass.

 

[The Last Stand]

Rockstar Games accounts require an authenticator to verify you. I tried signing in to my account, it asked for a code from an authenticator app I deleted. I had to contact Rockstar Support to reset my password and authenticator app linked to my account. Surprisingly, they responded within a few hours and resolved it. Two factor authentication for accounts doesn't always work.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

Rockstar Games accounts require an authenticator to verify you. I tried signing in to my account, it asked for a code from an authenticator app I deleted. I had to contact Rockstar Support to reset my password and authenticator app linked to my account. Surprisingly, they responded within a few hours and resolved it. Two factor authentication for accounts doesn't always work.

Rockstar deserves to have all their games pirated.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Having to deal with Sophos Endpoint Protection on client Macs has me wanting to burn Sophos HQ to the ground.

They refuse to make an installer for their product that works properly within the security protection built into macOS, and try to upsell you to their MDM platform to stop it from being a royal pain in the ass to manage installations and permissions.

And to give you some idea of how annoying it is, Sophos sends high priority alerts to their management tenant AND an email for each machine that is missing a permission, six times per day. Every day.

 

[The Last Stand]

I don’t like how the newer iPads and iPhones don’t have a home button. I tried using my mom’s iPad without one when I was teaching her how to pirate ebooks and the touch gestures you’re supposed to do to go to the Home Screen aren’t as responsive and don’t feel as good as just pushing a fucking button.

Do you know how many times and how long it takes to explain the gesture of getting to the home screen or the app switcher? At least with Androids, there's virtual buttons on the bottom.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

At least with Androids, there's virtual buttons on the bottom.

i miss the virtual buttons of Android.

 

[seri0us]

i miss the virtual buttons of Android.

You can still re-enable them

 

[Linksys WRT]

I have no idea why, but I could not get my NFS shares to mount via my fstab. Must've stared at the thing for an hour as I rebooted it, waited 90 seconds for the mount to fail, changed my fstab, reboot again, wait 90 seconds...
I eventually just gave up and wrote a systemd service to do it which works fine. But I feel kind of dirty for doing it like that.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

You can still re-enable them

I switched to iphone for family reasons and loathe how the navigation is frustrating at times.

 

[indomitable snowman]

Lenovo. Great business PCs and laptops, but some faggot decided to put fuckin FN button on Ctrl place. It can be switched in BIOS but by all that is sacred and holy, that idiot deserves to be raped by a pack of niggerfaggots
View attachment 7203370

I have a new one, Ctrl and FN are now normal with Ctrl on the left.

When the indians call me for IT help and I spend more time trying to figure out their name than I do fixing their shit

Hello Saar, this is Babaganishlankar pajjetashawbobsandvagine (add in poor sound quality and honking in the background). Atleast the Chinese guys will pick and easy English name to go by like Alex Li.

I have no idea why, but I could not get my NFS shares to mount via my fstab. Must've stared at the thing for an hour as I rebooted it, waited 90 seconds for the mount to fail, changed my fstab, reboot again, wait 90 seconds...
I eventually just gave up and wrote a systemd service to do it which works fine. But I feel kind of dirty for doing it like that.

I never have success with editing fstab....

 

[Penis]

I have no idea why, but I could not get my NFS shares to mount via my fstab. Must've stared at the thing for an hour as I rebooted it, waited 90 seconds for the mount to fail, changed my fstab, reboot again, wait 90 seconds...
I eventually just gave up and wrote a systemd service to do it which works fine. But I feel kind of dirty for doing it like that.

Some distros just do not play nice with fstab. I set up a Pi NAS a few months ago with an external HDD. I pointed fstab at the HDD to mount on boot. Somehow, my Pi got into a state where it wouldn't boot unless thr HDD was plugged in. Did not have that problem on my Ubuntu machine

 

[Linksys WRT]

Some distros just do not play nice with fstab. I set up a Pi NAS a few months ago with an external HDD. I pointed fstab at the HDD to mount on boot. Somehow, my Pi got into a state where it wouldn't boot unless thr HDD was plugged in. Did not have that problem on my Ubuntu machine

fstab is a cranky little thing. The worst part is that in my experience, it doesn't really fail gracefully. You're either waiting for some time, or it just says "nah, fuk u" and the whole system won't boot.

You really only NEED the OS partition to boot and EFI too, these days, but fstab doesn't agree sometimes.

 

[jeff7989]

Have you considered "noauto" flag in fstab? This way bootup will not halt when volume is not available.
You could also write a service to mount it later when system is fully loaded.

 

[Linksys WRT]

noauto

Eh, I need it to mount at boot because it's a seedbox whose files live on my NAS, so I can't have it not mount. But if I've already got a systemd service for it, it's probably best that I don't even bother with the fstab.

Either way, my systemd service is working fine. But the problem of "why is my fstab being a bitch" is clawing at the back of my head.

I mount it like
sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.63:/shared /mnt/shared
so I should probably be able to throw this in my fstab
192.168.1.63:/shared /mnt/shared/ nfs defaults 0 0

But that doesn't work. The fstab entry is pretty much the same as the command afaik, so I really don't know what's happening.

...

AND JUST AS I WAS READY TO POST I FIGURED IT OUT.

I have 0 for "pass" in that fstab line. I'm supposed to have 2. I knew there had to be something fucky with that entry.

man fstab says
"This field is used by fsck( 8 ) to determine the order in which filesystem checks are done at boot time. The root filesystem should be specified with a fs_passno of 1. Other filesystems should have a fs_passno of 2."

Yet another instance of "bro needs to RTFM." Thanks for the unintentional help.

 

[Penis]

I want to rant on some of the Jeetery I've encountered over the past few years. Any illusions I've had about Indians being some sort of tech savvy demographic has been completely shattered by working in the field.

1) Jeet put his eclipse workspace in the downloads directory
2) Jeet intern copied all of the proprietary code onto the laptop of his personal machine... On day 1
3) I wound up inheriting some embedded project that a Jeet started. At the time I inherit it, all he had was a primitive I2C passthrough. A quick peek into his code revealed:

• He initialized the clocks with a non-existent crystal oscillator. This caused the peripheral clocks to run extremely slow.
• He put a BLOCKING I2C TRANSACTION in his I2C interrupt handler. These are Embedded Software 101 level fuck ups.
  • Between these two issues, the I2c handler had all sorts of bugs. If you spammed commands to the chip, the bus would lock up.
  • Because the clocks where too slow, I2C interrupts would not fire fast enough to handle block transactions. You could only do single register writes.
• I later come to find out that the Jeet claiming credit for the code had nothing to do with it. He stole it from another Jeet.
• Needless to say, I wound up pitching the project and completely starting over. There wound up being nothing of value in the code given to me.

4) I had written a Firmware guide for a board I had been bringing up. I gave this guide to a Jeet coworker who's literal job-title was "Embedded Software Developer":

• He calls me over, saying the Firmware has bugs in it. This was early enough in development, so I believed him.
• He shows me his script he was using to interface with the Firmware.
• He was doing bizarre shit. Seemingly deliberately writing to Read-Only registers. Writing 16-bit values to 8-bit registers. It really looked like he didn't even RTFM.
• I spent about 20 minutes working with him. I asked him where he got the ideas to do all this bizarre shit, and he shrugged.
• I wound up just blankly asking him if he just fed the guide to an ChatGPT, and it spit out weird code, which he admitted.

5) I had been working on a prototype board with some experimental chips on it.:

• These chips where poorly documented, so management decided that I would need to fly to Asia to meet with the vendors, who could show us how to tune the chip.
• At the time, the prototype board was sitting on my desk.
• Two days before I needed to travel, Jeet decides to steal the prototype off my desk to run some tests on it. (Without asking me)
• I wound up confronting him on it. He had another identical looking board on his desk. I picked it up, and asked him if this was the board he took.
• He looked me straight in my eyes and said "yes".
• I go home and flash Firmware to it, stepping through on the debugger. Everything looks good.
• I fly to Asia.
• After 20 hours of traveling, waiting in customs, bumbling through chinkland, I finally make it to the vendor.
• For whatever reason, the board was not behaving as expected. Some registers where reading out chaotic values.
• Come to find out, the Jeet gave me the wrong board. I flew all the way out to Asia with the wrong fucking board.
• Fuck my retarded life, and fuck your retarded subcontinent.

These are just a few of my Jeet stories. I really could go all day. Its so exhausting working with these guys. I don't know why management is so eager to hire such shitty engineers. You'd be better off hiring Western interns if you want to save money on labor.