hi

o/

Morning all

how's life?

going good

computer's giving some problems - random freezes

not bsods, just freezes & stops responding

@Sathya primary suspect: drivers

likely drivers: video

any tips on getting to the root of the problem?

hm but haven't updated video drivers in a while

suggested fix: try updating video drivers (uninstall/reboot/loop until they're all gone first)

hm ok

@Sathya other possibility: overheating

not overheating, temps are below 40s

eh... I'm out of ideas

or we can always go back to the basics

1. how long has this been happening

2. what was the last thing you did

2a. if the answer to the last question was nothing, what was the last thing you did before nothing (I love asking that)

other random ideas: try a livecd

:)

3. how often does this happen?

4. does it resume after a bit or stay not responding?

no discernable pattern

could also be ATA transfer failures during reads or writes

(HDD issues...)

happens when idle

when you freeze, can you move the mouse?

happens when under activity

@Sathya once a day, 5x, one a week, that kinda thing

@allquixotic nope, keyb stops responding

wait, windows or linux?

@allquixotic oh yea, forgot that one

Win 8.1

I suspect HDD, but SMART don't say anything's bad

another suspect is networx

@Sathya you can always try a benchmark/stress test tool (backups first!)

or swap out the SATA cable, sometimes that dies

@Bob I'll same maybe once every other day.. but I've had 7+ day uptime & then 3 freezesa day

yay! more random!

...

I like giving you guys a tough time eh

incidentally, I recently fixed a similar issue with a video driver update (which is why i suggested that :P)

also appeared out of the blue

AMD?

nvidia

@Sathya you never did answer - does it recover after a while?

@Bob I think not, never waited long enough ( max~ 2-3 minutes & then I hit reset)

also, do you happen to use a SSD? there was this weird bug that was causing similar freezes from some command... there's a registry edit to fix that

but I can never find it in a search

it's bookmarked on the work pc :\

but there's no response from keyboard (ie lights don't go on/off

@Bob no ssd, a HDD

@Sathya try waiting 5-15

no response from kbd lights == kernel no longer handling interrupts

it's a BSOD that's so D it can't even render a :(

@allquixotic ditto for lack of cursor response

but it is recoverable, sometimes

I think not

usually when the blocking operation hits a timeout

@allquixotic I've had the same situation many times, often recovering

with nvidia drivers, it hits the user mode display driver timeout and restarts it

unless it's blocking in the main loop, in which case there's no other thread to rescue it and trigger the timeout

you can't timeout synchronously with only one thread of execution

with the weird SSD SATA bug, it hits some IO timeout and resumes normal operation

if the core spinlock is interrupted, you're dead

once a blue moon, I hit DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION from networx ( ~ once very other week) but this freeze is prevalent

i get those too, even rarer though

the freeze hit me today middle of a hearthstone game -.-

what gpu?

AMD 7750

:O\

i have a 7970.. maybe we're twins, having the same issue with AMD driver :D

since i get DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION too

oh yea

ah

had similar issues some time ago when my ODD had a bad SATA cable

thing is, with that kind of freeze, the behavior is non-deterministic, so there's no guarantee you'll see the BSOD

the remaining freezes are probably the same root cause but so hosed it can't even display the BSOD

@allquixotic eh, I've found freezes are more often waiting for some driver to finish an operation while BSoDs are more the driver does something obviously illegal

I say "I've found", but that's what's supposed to happen anyway

and I can say it does happen in practice

which is also why some types of freezes will recover

@Sathya also, hearthstone? your soul shall be mine!

we need to play sometime

:D

watch. your. back.

sathyabhat#6507

(I suck at it)

@Sathya the light shall burn you!

again - try updating drivers (full uninstall/restart/loop + update)

try swapping out the SATA cables if possible

or at least replugging them

okay

try a HDD stress test

wilco

annnd I'm gonna sleep

@Bob which tool? HD Tune?

if all else fails, give up and hope that your hearthstone freezes again when you're in a game with me, for a free win

@Sathya should do

anything that hammers the HDD with requests

but make sure you have a backup!

@allquixotic ha. will be my first win :D

@Bob yeah, that I do

@Bob Thanks for mentioning the StackOverflowException stuff earlier.

I just got a support ticket about the .Net runtime crashing without executing any of the catch/finally handlers or logging errors

I swear this stuff could not be more perfectly timed

@DarthAndroid lol awesome

that whole conversation is my fault though

so you should thank me

Thank you!

:P

@DarthAndroid there's also OutOfMemoryException that can do this

It's always fun learning new stuff :)

now the problem is trying to track down the cause...

without logging! joy!

@Bob I'm fairly confident it's not an OOM in this case, but I suppose that's possible.

amen!

i'm really surprised .NET doesn't have Errors like Java for uncatchable system/environment problems

@Bob Not my problem :D

OutOfMemoryError >>>> OutOfMemoryException

you can't catch OOM and do anything meaningful

@allquixotic I guess at least the MS CLR is too close to the system for that.

I get the impression the JVM has a little more abstraction for things like stack allocation. Could be wrong (never really looked into it).

It does

it gets hairy with the JIT

Mono and presumably .NET JIT too

Well, yeah, but I already know .Net is using the native thread stack

Pretty sure it's the system terminating the entire runtime.

Which raises the question why they didn't do something like @DarthAndroid suggested with a larger stack guard.

Can a process set custom stack sizes per-thread?

@DarthAndroid yep

or does it require system privileges to do that?

(well, to make them huge)

Because I've had to give 5MB stacks to some java apps that were handling large data

You can also create a guard page with Win32.

@DarthAndroid No, you can do it with System.Threading.Thread

or, if you want the main thread to have a different stack size you can edit the PE headers

some tool in the Windows SDK, I think

.NET's default stack size is actually quite big

I remember I was looking into reducing it at one point

was spinning off a thousand threads to stress test a java message queue (which was actually about 3k because of the stupid JMS client spinning off two of its own and blocking - it didn't do async requests either)

Then Java might have native stack frames for the java stack frames

@DarthAndroid would throwing things into arrays of integral types (nested in classes as necessary) make it allocate them on the heap instead? (performance--, but, no stack size explosion, which could end up being a net win)

arrays implicitly "extend" Object in Java, IIRC

so they'd be heap allocated

@HackToHell O_o

@allquixotic Arrays are definitely heap-allocated

The only things that get to use the stack are primitives and pointers to non-primitives.

@DarthAndroid I guess maybe your app was so complicated that it literally got "pointered" to death -- enough to need 5 MB of stack -- pretty impressive

or they just had a ton of long primitives in a long call chain, or recursion or such

Oh, I'm sure it was recursion. You'd have to have so many functional parameters and individual variable declarations to overflow the stack that I don't think I've ever seen that happen as a leading cause.

it does some recursive copy when you try to snapshot it, I'm pretty sure)

@DarthAndroid it's a little easier to blow the stack in C++, though, I find... frameworks like Qt actively encourage you to stack-allocate your data structures, so you can have 2d arrays of pixels and other such "large" data on the stack sometimes

in Qt, strings still get pooled into the heap (COW) and the stack-allocated bit is just a reference (IIRC), but much other stuff has the actual data payload on the stack

@HackToHell @Sathya etc. if you are considering a move to the US for a job, tread carefully my friend

@allquixotic Oh, yes, but you don't have that in java, and the profiler is written in java

well, to be more accurate, the profiler is the JVM, this is just a client that connects

@allquixotic I kinda get the feeling they're not the type to fall for those :P

@Bob Are you in Sydney?

Haven't seen one of these by chance?

@MichaelFrank Nope. Where are they?

I haven't been to the CBD since last Friday.

Mardi Gras is next weekend, I think, which might explain that.

Yeah, there's about 10 of them around apparently.

o.O

TIL the Sydney Mardi Gras isn't quite like one in other places...

@MichaelFrank You got a list of locations?

Though, that looks like an ANZ one (can barely read the card image). I'm with CommBank - wouldn't have much reason to use those.

@Bob Yea, they are ANZ.

@MichaelFrank Well, I'm heading out today. Anywhere I should take a look at?

support.microsoft.com/kb/261186

SUMMARY: During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

@Hennes wut.

Wut ^ 2

I just checked the date. It is not the first of April.

@Bob •ANZ’s GAYTMs can be found in various Sydney locations on Oxford Street, Pitt Street, George Street, Castlereagh Street, Surry Hills and Bondi Junction

@MichaelFrank Damn. I'm not passing those today.

Maybe Friday.

Wait, Castlereagh? O.O

Problem is, I have no idea where ANZ puts their ATMs...

couple of Westpac, CommBank...

@Bob I'm sure you'll find it difficult to miss them now. :P

True enough!

WUT

businessinsider.com.au/nokia-android-phone-nokia-x-2014-2

> The Nokia X is a 4-inch phone that will cost 89 Euros, and is available immediately. The Nokia X+ will be 99 Euros, and it will have more storage. Nokia is also rolling out an XL phone, which has a 5-inch screen. The X+ and XL will be out in early Q2. The X phones will be rolling out “broadly,” but starting in “high-growth markets.”

holy shit

I... actually kinda want one

> Nokia says its primary focus is the Lumia line, which is based on the Windows Phone platform. Nokia X is a lower-end product going after developing markets.

or not :(

!!tell 13953076 no

@allquixotic :(

also, the Nokia X / X+ is an AOSP non-Gapps phone.... "Nokia Store" lolol

@allquixotic meh. root => fun

root = no Verizon. lol

and, really, I love Nokia hardware

@allquixotic I don't live in the US :P

@Bob this isn't your father's Nokia (or something like that)

we have these things called SIM cards

basically the hardware is going to suuuuuuuck

> lower-end

@allquixotic ...I have a L520 I rather like

don't expect this to be a brick like old Nokia devices

..

I had an E65 (two, actually), N8 and Lumia 520.

it probably has a plastic screen :D

None of them are bricks

Nokia doesn't know what it wants to do or who it wants to side with. it never has

@allquixotic gah. Maemo! D:

it's been all over the freaking board

Symbian^3 was actually halfway decent

Maemo, Android, Microsoft, Symbian, Qt, ... I mean...

had it in lieu of Android around that time

hardware was lower-power, but it worked well

and Maemo had a compat layer for Android apps

...but nooo, they dropped it

it's really embarrassing how Nokia has been kind of bouncing between various platforms in the past few years... they should just pick a side and stick with it, grow some internal expertise with that platform and champion it

@allquixotic Still, I like their hardware.

And I'm talking current-gen.

@Bob lol, PalmSource/ACCESS's ACCESS Linux Platform (based on the idea of porting desktop GTK2 apps to the phone "seamlessly", with multi-touch support, using a lot of runtime stuff) had a Garnet VM for PalmOS 5.x

another albatross that never flew

nzherald.co.nz/world/news/…

Now that's cool!

@MichaelFrank kinetic energy at work

@allquixotic So... work at work?

@Bob -_- SRIV 60% off on HIB right now

@Bob yuss!

@allquixotic .....

how much was the steam sale discounted?

i dont remember T_T

-_-

@allquixotic steamprices.com/au/app/206420/saints-row-iv

25AUD lowest here

without the DLC

you sent me 41 usd for all of the SRIV content

20USD lowest

again, without DLC

@allquixotic Full cart including HIB DLCs is 44 USD

But there's been a couple of DLC packs released in the last month.

So, about the same.

Hm

@allquixotic I guess the advantage (for me) of HIB is I can pay the US price directly :P

except the base game costs as much as the AUD price on sale anyway, and even more after conversion..

HIB?

@MichaelFrank Humble Indie Bundle

though it's really more HB these days

Ahh

@Bob HAAAB? :D

Are you sure you're not confusing the Weekly bundle and the regular bundles? :P

Ugh... the conversation is so much better here than over at the Gaming.SE chat room!

@MichaelFrank what's wrong with The Bridge?

aside from...... eh, nevermind

@allquixotic They were ripping into this guy because he friend requested some girl.

Is there a good program for parsing Apache log files?

ParselTongue

@MichaelFrank Was that to me?

Oh yea, sorry.

@MichaelFrank heh...

I searched for that, but don't see any programs

@CanadianLuke it was a joke. :X

@CanadianLuke vim

well, that's what I use anyway

how exactly do you parse a log file, apart from some grep and vim?

@Bob he's probably still trying to work out how to parse Apache logs using the magical snake language. :D

Softwarerecs.SE.com? Maybe?

@Bob I was hoping for a tool that I could feed my log file into, and it could summarize what is in there

"summarise"?

"you have 5000 errors"?

Really not sure what you can summarise from an Apache log...

"The chamber of secrets has opened!"

Ha ha, I got a program called "Apache Log Viewer". Free for basic use, which is all I want

@CanadianLuke and what does it do, just display the literal text of each Apache line in a table?

And filter, which is useful

...that's what grep is for

@CanadianLuke I have to admit, that's a little silly from the perspective of someone who knows how to use basic UNIX tools

@allquixotic sometimes you just want buttons to click.

@Bob I understand I can use Grep, but as @MichaelFrank states, sometimes you just want to push buttons!

My actual goal is to see what requests aren't going to where my site is located, and block those IP addresses

@CanadianLuke That's what all the grep GUIs are for

The extra legwork of pulling the logfile off of a server to my local system negates any desire to click buttons for me :X

Also, grep -v (your site) | grep -e '[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}'

add -o to the second grep if you want a list of just the IP addresses that you can plug into another pipe

@DarthAndroid Nope

Huh, this is really cool

@CanadianLuke Yup, though I botched some of the options

Should be grep -E or egrep for the second, and the first grep needs a filename

but

sudo grep -v "dragonzone.net" access.log | grep -v "10.0.3.2" | egrep -o '[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}' | sort | uniq

Totally works

(The extra grep -v 10.0.3.2 is to filter out a local network that accesses by IP address)

A lot of these are google bots I think

Wtf baidu is spidering my site

._.

64.15.159.21 - - [24/Feb/2014:10:35:47 -0500] "GET /w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec:) HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "ZmEu"

Whelp, guess I'm already being pen-tested.

I suppose I'll lock things down when I get home.

Indeed :)

Need to shut that off.

Only using subdomains currently

@DarthAndroid So what does that tell you?

What does what tell me?

The output of the full command, the line about being pentested, or the default nginx page that you pasted to me?

The line I replied to, which is the output I guess.

It tells me that you visted dragonzone.net, or typed in the IP directly.

Mostly because I'm not using that domain yet, but I'm using several subdomains off of it.

and I haven't locked down the root page

What does that tell you.

That in particular tells me that there are romanians probing my server for vulnerabilities

It is preceeded/proceeded by attempts to open two common MySQL admin panels

(MyAdmin and phpMyAdmin)

This is what I mean: pastebin.com/PpsbdUSd

Can't see pastebin at work. :/

115.238.101.45 - - [23/Feb/2014:09:14:37 -0500] "GET /phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "ZmEu"
115.238.101.45 - - [23/Feb/2014:09:14:37 -0500] "GET /phpMyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "ZmEu"
115.238.101.45 - - [23/Feb/2014:09:14:37 -0500] "GET /w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec:) HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "ZmEu"
115.238.101.45 - - [23/Feb/2014:09:14:37 -0500] "GET /MyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "ZmEu"
115.238.101.45 - - [23/Feb/2014:09:14:37 -0500] "GET /pma/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "ZmEu"

Ahh okay, I see. I was just curious what the number and string near the end were.

well

200 is the status code (e.g., 404 = file not found, 200 = ok)

not sure what 396 is

"-" is the requested subdomain

or the referrer

one of the two

the last string is the user agent

@DarthAndroid Ahhh that worked! Now, I just need to see what they're accessing, or if they're bots

With nginx, it's easy to check the user agent

@DarthAndroid I use Fail2ban to block these accesses

65.55.213.69 - - [23/Feb/2014:08:01:50 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 396 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)";
220.181.108.146 - - [23/Feb/2014:08:27:46 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +baidu.com/search/spider.html)";

The ZmEu user agent string is blocked on sight

@DragonLord I started reading about Fail2ban, but I need time to sit down and iron out what I want

@DragonLord Yeah, need to look into that

My Fail2ban configuration is available upon request

@CanadianLuke There's an example of Bing and Baidu's spiders

@DarthAndroid These accesses are normal--don't block them, or you won't be found on search engine result pages

@DragonLord I know

robots.txt is how you tell those to stay away :)

Guess who's got internet at home starting today!

And guess who's having the privilege to pay for 5mbps to get 2,5mbps

Oh, and the router provided by the ISP has a 2nd, unstoppable, unconfigurable SSID sharing my home connection to the world.

Are you at least getting free service?

(The IS tech, obviously, never mentioned it and I had to google for the symptoms)

Whoops, missed that

I have a bit of a concern with one of my blog posts

Emphasis on the pay for

I suppose calling up support is out of the question?

A blog post about a responsive redesign of my main website is attracting a lot of spam attempts, and my server logs indicate a lot of rather unnatural traffic to that blog post

or otherwise getting the SSID turned off?

It's not really much more than a meta post on my website--should I delete the post?

@DarthAndroid Not exactly, it's just they're utterly useless.

I managed to turn it off in the end, thanks to a random forum post

Oh, good.

I just had to access 192.168.1.1/undocumented-url-never-mentioned-anywhere

Hits	%	Bandwidth	URL
674	8.07%	15.42 MiB	/index.php?/archives/8-Main-site-redesigned-for-responsiveness.html
462	5.53%	10.34 MiB	/index.php?/archives/3-Issues-in-the-blog-software-resolved-Updated.html
346	4.15%	10.52 MiB	/index.php?/archives/5-Dhrystone-Running-a-25-year-old-benchmark-on-modern-hardware.html
306	3.67%	6.72 MiB	/index.php?/archives/6-IPv6-enabled.html

@ThatBrazilianGuy ask & answer on SU.

But seriously, WTF? Sneakly inserting a 2nd SSID on my router? Not even malware creators are so bold and evil.

That's actually a thing, though not quite on those terms

Usually it's <public Wifi Hotspot provider> offers you a free router or free router/connection

Three of the four posts listed above are garnering are getting amounts of traffic that are unexpected for content that is about the blog or the website itself

@DarthAndroid It's a Brazilian ISP. All the google searches will be in Portuguese, there'll be barely no hits and no users helped.

@CanadianLuke, should I delete every one of these posts except the Dhrystone one?

@ThatBrazilianGuy Ah, blog post it is, then. :)

@DarthAndroid Yes, apparently my paid carrier thinks it is a great idea to do that without telling its clients

They seem to be attracting unnatural spambot traffic

@DarthAndroid I don't have a blog

I lack the diligence and focus to have one :(

@DragonLord not sure what to tell you.

@DragonLord Insert a block rule on .htaccess or something like that

A close read of the server logs indicate that a large portion of accesses to the meta posts are from spambots trying to post spam comments (they're automatically blocked)

@DragonLord Nah, just rename it

shrugs

As to why it's those posts, I'd say probably just because the bots found links to those posts and not the other ones

@CanadianLuke: I think I'm going to close comments on those posts. That will stop the spam accesses.

Got it

If you're wondering about the how the table was generated, I used GoAccess

@that simple, wrap it in tinfoil and get your own Wi-Fi router

@bob chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13956681#13956681

@Darth the tinfoil approach is more certain and tinfoilly

GoAccess works for me!

> Note: Due to excessive spamming attempts on this post, comments have been closed.

@CanadianLuke It's amazing how much information server logs contain...

I agree

I apparently need a favicon though

@ThatBrazilianGuy: hmm, second SSID. You could set up a second, stronger AP with the same name

then most systems would 'prefer' the stronger AP, connect to that, and find themselves seeing whatever you want them to see ;p