Thursday, October 15, 2015
… and then the router broke
The badness kept going yesterday.
As I was getting ready for work, Bunny informed me that she had to reboot both the DSL modem and the router. When I checked them, the lights on the router were off. Not a good sign. I pulled the power cord and plugged it back in, the lights started operating normally, then they went out, back on, went out, back on, and well, it's not supposed to be blinking Christmas lights. Bunny mentioned that on Tuesday there were a few power fluctuations and maybe that fried the electroncs.
It was then that the past month of computer aggrivation hit me and I'm afraid I took it out on the malfunctioning router (well, I assume it was malfunctioning; it certainly was malfunctioning after I was done with it). Bunny then asked if I was okay to drive to work, I said no, so she offered to drive. Only I couldn't engage the seat belt.
I took it as a sign that “the Universe” was telling me it was a bad week to stop taking meth, called in sick, and went back to bed.
At 5:00 pm, I awoke, and Bunny and I headed out to get a new router and UPS. A couple of hours, several hundred dollars, a few stores, and many many miles later I was trying configure the new router and was not having luck. It wanted an Internet connection (I'm trying to set you up first before placing you on the live Internet you incalcitrant piece of consumer electronics!) It then started asking for a password I didn't have!
There was this CD included with the router—perhaps it had the instruction manual? Sure enough, it did. The only file on the disk, a large PDF of the manual.
In Arabic!
It was at that point that Bunny sent me to bed before I caused any more collateral damage.
I awoke at 2:00 am this morning. Bunny had tried quite a bit to get the router working. Using the “hot spot” feature of her iPhone, she was able to surf the Intarwebs for an English version of the manual but quickly got to a point she didn't feel comfortable with. I started poking with it again and well … bless her heart, Bunny had the patience to deal with our ISP technical support to get us up and running again. That email we received on the first? Yeah, more than just the email server changed. Turned out we needed a new password to log onto the Internet but it took an hour long phone call to figure that out.
So I have my iPhone restored, my Mac upgraded, and our Internet connection restored. Synergy isn't working, but I think at this point, I should stop complaining.
I think my long October nightmare is finally over
My friend, Brian, concerned for my sanity, did some searching and sent me this:
- From
- Brian Yoder <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
- To
- Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>
- Subject
- El Capitan: Rootless "feature"
- Date
- Thu, 15 Oct 2015 14:23:33 -0400
From: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193368/what-is-the-rootless-feature-in-el-capitan-really
When you upgrade to El Capitan, it moves any "unauthorized" files from restricted areas to
/Library/SystemMigration/History/Migration-(someUUID)/QuarantineRoot/.
Really?
[spc]marvin:~>ll /Library/SystemMigration/History/Migration-0C65E56F-4185-42B0-BBE8-5537E4FDEE38/QuarantineRoot/usr/bin/ total 92472 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 60212 Dec 6 2005 bbdiff -rwsr-xr-x 1 root wheel 86416 Dec 6 2005 bbedit -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 21226488 Feb 4 2005 emacs (from old Mac) -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 21226488 Feb 4 2005 emacs-21.2.1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1511312 Dec 21 2010 pkgbuild -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1605200 Dec 21 2010 productbuild -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1440848 Dec 21 2010 productsign -rwxr-xr-x 1 wlofie staff 1195132 May 14 2010 synergyc -rwxr-xr-x 1 wlofie staff 1751764 May 14 2010 synergys -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3561 Jul 12 2007 zegrep (from old Mac) -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3561 Jul 12 2007 zfgrep (from old Mac) -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 103 Jul 12 2007 zless (from old Mac) [spc]marvin:~>
Oh.
There are my missing executables!
In /usr/bin!
And … owned by wlofie?
How did—
Nevermind!
I found them!
I had to copy them out of that directory to $HOME/bin so they won't get blown away again.
Then I had to tweak “System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Privacy” to allow Terminal and “sshd-keygen-wrapper” to have control over my computer,
then I can run synergys in the foreground,
and it works!
If I let synergys run in the background
(as it does by default)
then El Presidente de Por Vida prevents it from doing anything useful.
But I got it to work!
So now I'm back to where I was on October 1st!
Woot!
![[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2023/1023.t.jpg "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades")