Have been working on other projects so not much time to update the server or other things lately. But have been looking at Fing as another option for network security.
Apple Watch 6 fails to install data plan
Was lucky enough to order and take delivery of the new Apple Watch 6 on launch day, but joy slightly tempered by ongoing issues to transfer my 4G data plan from the old Series 3 to the new device.
Various calls to EE, my network provider so far have been unable to resolve, despite various resetting of the watch and phone settings to get it working.
Only really a pain when out running, as I don’t take my phone so missed SMS and other alerts. Apparentlty a known issue, but not helping me much….
AppleTV – new toys
Sorting out the house over the summer I came across an old AppleTV Gen 2 box. Its long since gave up getting updates and logging into the damn things proved a trial as its too old to recognize 2FA logins.
Some googling threw up the fact you can still do this, but have to append the generate 2FA code to your password in the password field.
This unlocked my iCloud so I could bring up my Camera Roll and finally accessed all the photos I have taken over the years from my phone. Too many don’t make it into proper albums or printed, but watching them back brings back happy memories of holidays and days out.
A bonus byproduct of this trial of viewing old photos, which I had hooked into the AV AMP under the telly, was the music quality that was being pumped out alongside the pictures. Being a Gen2 AppleTv, though the pictures although good did not match the audio quality, being a max of 720 lines.. not even full HD.
A quick trawl of Amazon turned up the AppleTV 4K 64Gb model on a next day delivery with payments spread over 5 months.. Not quite an impulse purchase, but now I have access to all of the Apple content and HQ music and easy access to all the family photos for not much more that a good quality digital photo frames of not so long ago.
the TvOS has come along way since the original device, so will probably penlty of playing with the new apps and settings to get things just right.
PHPipam, FreeBSD and network discovery
PHPipam is an IP Address Management utility written in PHP. Slightly overkill for managing a home network with just one subnet and just a possible 255 different IP addresses for me to manage, but hey, its free and we use it at work so being able to hack about with it in the safety of my own home is quite nice.
However, FreeBSD is not first choice for PHPipam average users so the default locations for Ping and FPing are not where a standard Linux install would expect to find them. For FreeBSD you have to log into your PHPipam landing page and head to the Administration section and amend the path for :
/bin/ping to /sbin/ping note the extra s
and
/bin/fping to /usr/local/sbin/fping
and then network discovery scans should work for you
Pairing Alexa / Echo Devices for Stereo
Finding I had a couple of spare Gen 1 Echo devices (the nice solid ones with the rotary volume dial atop) I thought I would try and pair for proper Stereo effects in the Kitchen. Sadly there are distinct pairing combinations you can use. and two Gen 1 Echos don’t cut the mustard. I wasn’t too worried as the reason for the spares is that I have slowly been upgrading Echo’s so they all support the HD quality stream so suspect I will be buying some more!
This chart from Amazon details what you can actually pair together.
| Echo Device | Pairable Devices |
|---|---|
| Echo (1st Generation) | Echo Sub |
| Echo (2nd Generation) | Echo (2nd Generation)Echo Sub |
| Echo (3rd Generation) | Echo (3rd Generation)Echo Plus (2nd Generation)Echo Sub |
| Echo Dot (3rd Generation) | Echo Dot (3rd Generation)Echo Dot with clockEcho Sub |
| Echo Dot with clock | Echo Dot with ClockEcho Dot (3rd Generation)Echo Sub |
| Echo Plus (1st Generation) | Echo Plus (1st Generation)Echo Sub |
| Echo Plus (2nd Generation) | Echo Plus (2nd Generation)Echo (3rd Generation)Echo Sub |
| Echo Show (1st Generation) | Echo Sub |
| Echo Show (2nd Generation) | Echo Sub |
| Echo Show 5 | Echo Show 5Echo Sub |
| Echo Show 8 | Echo Sub |
| Echo Studio | Echo StudioEcho Sub |
Grrr Nettle woes next
After finally getting RHASH to build, a few easy days and then Nettle would not build. I tried everything, MAKE CLEAN, DEINSTALL, rebuilding build dependencies, nothing worked. Re-installing the old package again kept everything work.
In deperation, I saw the the GHOST-BSD laptop I am currently testing had a built package for nettle-3.6 so in desparation and part trial, I copied the nettle package from the laptop to the server and then issued SUDO PKG ADD path/to/nettle.3.5.xxx and hey presto, it installed and after several reboots and rebuilds of dependent packages it works. Its probably not the safest or more secure, but allowed all the packages that then depend on GNUTLS to build to the latest ports.
RHASH build woes
Have spent two weeks trying to update RHASH from 1.3.5 to 1.3.9 via ports, but kept giving build errors on openssl.mod which no one else was reporting. Tried to deinstall clean and rebuild and still no go.
Checked Freshports for updates and it is not updated very often but did notice that gettext-tools and gettext-runtime where listed as dependencies too. So quick make deinstall clean and re-install I thought might help. But part way thru reinstalling, Sudo no longer worked on getting gettext-runtime to function. Seems deinstalling gettext-tools broke Sudo. So quick SU to rebuild gettext-tools and sign out and back in again might fix it.
but oh no, still the same build error. However asking portmaster to build atril, it then went away happily and updated RHASH thereby allowing CMAKE to update and now the remaining ports seems to be updating happily enough.
Alexa / Echo Calling
Amazon are very good about telling you how to connect to other users via Echo to Echo calling or Drop In, but less good on how to end the call.
Have been shouting various things like disconnect or Alex disconnect, but seems the correct syntax is “Alexa Hang Up”.
I guess it has to been quite specific so you don’t accidentally end the call because you uttered the magic phrase
Mobile posting
Just a quick entry to check I can post okay from my tablet. Maybe more beneficial. From my phone so I can upload photos. Nice and easy to do from the official WordPress app, just needed to enter the url of my self-hosted domain and user\password combo
Things to do in lockdown – rebuild world!
Well, FreeBSD world. time had come to update to 12.1 release and thankfully its been much easier than the jump from 11.x to 12.0 Merge did not throw up any issues and 12.1 base built itself overnight ready for installing yesterday morning.
Only pain has been trying to stop python2 getting installed with re-installing all the ports. I think I am just going to have to accept until everything is rebuilt and then remove it. Default versions have been defined in make.conf but seems some ports ignore.
Biggest challenge I was running the Kmod-legacy-drm drivers in the belief these were correct. Several reboots and reinstalls and tinkering did not resolve the unreadable display at boot time meant I had to SSH in from elsewhere to work on it. The cure in the end was quite simple, install the current kmod driver port and voila hi-res text and graphics have been restored. Only issue now is that the Mate Desktop menu’s have disappeared to I can’t actually quit the desktop. but least I can work the box directly now.
EDIT: reinstall of Mate notifications and menu ports has restored my menus.