Monthly Archives: August 2018

Camera Fun… (not really)

I have a Canon 7D Mk 1. Two actually. I bought one with an underwater housing, and it’s awesome. I bought another locally to use as a spare in case there’s a problem with the UW camera. Housings cost a lot more than cameras for most models, so it’s good insurance to have a spare camera.

Anyway, some time ago the 7D (land) model started to fail. I got “Err 20” errors when I’d try and take a photo. At first it seemed to correlate to using the pop-up flash, but later it simply happened any time, and eventually all the time.

I sent the camera to a Victoria camera shop that could fix Canons, as it was a lot cheaper than sending it back to Ontario – the only Authorized Canon Center in Canada.

It was diagnosed with the problem “stutter failure”. The quoted repair price was good, so I had them proceed. After just over a month, it came back “good as new”. Except, after a couple of weeks, the “Err 20” returned.

I sent it back under repair warranty, and the tech said “I don’t know”. So they sent it back to Canon Canada (in Ontario) to have it diagnosed. It turned out to be the mirror box, which was replaced. Fortunately, it was under repair warranty so I didn’t have to pay anything.

As it turns out, there is a very rare case where both the shutter and mirror box fail, but you can’t diagnose the mirror box until you clear (i.e. fix) the shutter problem. That was the case for my camera.

At any rate, it’s back now and working perfectly. I’ve been using it to take my renovation photos since it came back.

Glassblowing update – August 2018

Nothing to report. Literally. I’ve been working on the main bathroom renovation since late June, and then in July Linda broke her ankle. Between the two, I’ve had no time at all to even enter the glass shop.

Maybe in September I can check the wiring connection and put things back together, but not right now.

Renos

The past few months I’ve been working on a major home renovation in my spare time… replacing the shower and tub in our main bathroom. It’s been a lot of work, and a lot of ‘my brain hurts’ design work and design decisions.

At this point I have multiple spreadsheets running with design choices, templates, calculations and patterns. Very complex but also a lot of fun.

 

Email Oops

I woke up one morning, and checked my email as usual. All was good. A little later, I wanted to send a reply to one message.

It would not send. I kept getting “timeout on mail server” errors. I tried several things, and nothing worked. Finally, I called my email provider to as if the mail server was in some way affected.

Nope. But then I got asked a series of questions about my config. Apparently “everything” was wrong with it. I made the changes they recommended, but hate them as the password is sent in plain text. Yuk. But… at least I could send email again.

Later in the day I was doing some other work, and had reason to open the taskbar box (win 7). I noticed something odd. The Pulse Connect icon showed it was active. I have to use Pulse to create a secure tunnel to AU in order to view exams that I mark. Usually I activate the tunnel, mark the exam and then disconnect. However, this day I saw that I was still connected.

Acting on a hunch, I disconnected the Pulse tunnel. Then I opened my email and reset the configurations to what I had before the morning phone call. Lo and behold, I could send email again with a secure password.

SO – the tunnel to AU was interfering with access to my email provider’s SNMP (send) server. Interesting. Something to note in case I do that again.

OpenBSD Weirdness… and NO permanent solution

A couple of weeks ago I accidentally turned off one of my UPSes. Every morning it starts beeping a warning about the battery complete with yellow warning light. So I was inspecting it and wanted to silence the alarm. Well, hitting the big button is NOT the way to silence the alarm. Yes, it does silence the alarm, but it does so by turning OFF the UPS.

Oops. Killed three servers; my OpenBSD web server and firewall, my Solaris Tomcat box and my backup file server. I restored power, then did a ‘hot swap’ for new batteries, which sadly did not solve the beeping problem. I suspect it’s just old age on that UPS and it’s now cranky. Oh well.

Meantime, all three servers came back up without apparent incident. Except… my home info server running under Tomcat on the Solaris box was unavailable. I checked a local port, and it was working fine, but  not via the firewall server.

After much checking, a couple of reboots and some web reading, it became apparent that the OpenBSD firewall did NOT load the packet filter rules when it booted. As soon as I manually loaded them the Tomcat server was again available.

I searched and searched, but there is absolutely no reason I can find as to why a working OpenBSD server would fail to load the PF rules on boot. The rules are good; there were no error messages at all in the boot logs, and it’s always worked in the past.

For now I just made a note to check date and pf rules whenever that server gets rebooted, which fortunately is about once every several years. I also need to keep my fingers off the big UPS button!