Category: Computer Maintenance and Repair

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I Glitched Cockpit and Discovered Multi-user Login

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project for the week. Let’s get started!

My mother needed an extra browser, so I installed Firefox hardened it a little. I took the liberty of adding the Bitwarden plugin, encouraging her to make an account on my self-hosted instance. Remembering my failure so far to diagnose the “Network Error” blocking log in, I spared the time to learn how new Bitwarden clients are slightly incompatible with old Vaultwarden servers.

I easily could have updated Vaultwarden with maybe a note on the blog Discord. Instead, I felt like adding VaultwardenUsr@localhost to Cockpit with “Add new host.” This stunt worked at the cost of forwarding shadow8472@ButtonMash to VaultwardenUsr@ButtonMash when to logging in. Relogging didn’t help, and the hosts list saw VaultwardenUsr as the primary login – disallowing me from removing it, and as a remote login – blocking my attempts to add my real primary account back in with the same stunt.

While exploring this bug, I logged into my old laptop server and linked its Cockpit back into ButtonMash without getting forwarded to VaultwardenUsr. At this point, I submitted a bug report to Cockpit’s GitHub. I soon found the malformed host list at /etc/cockpit/machines.d/99-webui.json. I backed it up, purged the malformed entry, and updated GitHub with my workaround.

Out of curiosity, I added VaultwardenUsr@192.168.0.— as an alternate host. This sends packets for an extra detour, but it works as required. Only after all this did I update my Vaultwarden image from Docker Hub and deploy a new container from it using the same command as the last two successful times.

Note: While working on next week’s project, I logged into VaultwardenUsr@127.0.0.1 and other loopback IP’s with no problems. It’s just name@localhost that causes problems.

Takeaway

1 day for the win! My push for PiHole and supporting network projects has been intense lately, so it’s great to have a smaller project where I still learn while by doing something important.

Final Question

Have you ever misused a software feature successfully? What challenges did you face before getting it to work how you had in mind?

look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Socials.

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Never Underestimate Your Gremlins

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am working on my home network. Let’s get started!

Where to begin? Last week I left off with Puppy Linux. Well, I successfully installed it to a USB. While hardening FireFox, I noticed that the popular search-engine/online-advertising company is pushing out a new set of standards for their popular browser called Manifest 3 that will cripple functionality browser-based ad blockers rely on to keep prying eyes out (all in the name of privacy, of course); Mozilla/FireFox will be adopting these standards, with roll out this month: January 2023.

Network Collapse

In response, I prioritized setting up PiHole, a network-based ad blocker which won’t be affected by Manifest 3 and will work on Android devices. I soon learn it’s available in an OCI/“Docker” container. Long story short, I install it to ButtonMash and my old laptop for logistical reasons involving my dormant Family Photo Trunk project. I went to adjust the router’s DNS (Domain Name Server) settings to point at my PiHole containers figuring the worst that could happenwould be I just need five minutes tops to revert changes… the router moved itself from 192.168.0.1 to 162.168.1.1, collapsing the home network – including the workstation I was planning on using to fix it!

I was more than a bit stunned. Lucky for me, my old laptop was on a static IP address; unlucky: Bitwarden password manager has been a pain on that machine as of late, so I had to copy it manually from elsewhere. Once I was in, I reverted the DNS settings to automatic and most computers recovered by toggling network off and on (or rebooting) to refresh the automatic DHCP settings.

Upstairs Workstation

A while back, I rigged up a Raspberry Pi to work as a Wi-Fi catcher/subnet router, and it’s served me well up to this point. I switched its static, subnet-facing IP so it didn’t conflict with the one now claimed by the router, but as Iwas researching how to adjust its DHCP settings for the new subnet, I noticed its base operating system is at least months past end-of-life.  

Takeaway

I need to stop quoting optimistic worst-case scenarios. Gremlins can and will make a fool of me. On the other hand, I’m very thankful I had my laptop-server still able to navigate the crippled network with its static IP.  

I’ll be keeping the router where it is and see how saving the band of 192.168.0.* for static IP’s plays out. I guess I have the rest of this month’s projects planned out…

Final Question

What is the biggest computer oops you’ve ever had (and recovered from)?

Furthermore

I had a small adventure getting this post from LibreOffice on my upstairs workstation over to my blog without Internet. The way my filesystem is set up, it the save feature hangs badly when a mounted network drive doesn’t respond. I ended up using a .txt file on a thumb drive, and dumping it to the command line with cat, a terminal program to concatenate.

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I’m Learning Puppy Linux

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am overhauling an old Windows XP machine with a tiny distro called Puppy Linux. Let’s get started!

About Puppy

Tiny Linux distributions have reduced complexity – meaning fewer distractions from the core functionality of your system, which makes them work great as a learning environment. I learned the Linux terminal on MicroCore Linux building upon previous experience from using commands in games like Minecraft. I aimed a bit too high and stalled when I wasn’t ready to start repackaging software, but I still consider that period one of the most productive projects regardless.

Another good use for miniature Linux distros is old computers. Specialty software, like commercial quality games, may pose an extra challenge to locate and install various libraries found in general purpose systems, but if all you need is a browser and a basic office suite, a refurbished system with a slim OS may be all you need.

The first thing I learned coming back to Puppy was that it’s a whole branch of Linux distributions and has been for some time [1]. Even a distro outside the definition of puppy/puplet/etc. may still be considered part of the family if it follows certain principles Puppy is built upon.

Exploring Puppy

My project this week is on an old church office computer running Windows XP Professional 32 bit on a 64 bit CPU. It has 2GB DDR2 RAM and a pair of 150GB HDD’s configured in a BIOS-level “Intel ARRAY” (mirrored per RAID 1, but not in name) with a 100 GB main partition, a 50GB partition labeled backup, and a couple tiny partitions for system files/recovery files respectively.

One talking point from Puppy’s site is how “Grandpa friendly” it is and how active the community is. I went ahead with making an account on the forum, left a request for a most user-friendly puppy overnight in the new users’ section. I never gotten so much help so fast. Consensus was that I should try Friendly Fossa 64-4 once I brought up that I was interested in burning it to CD – my third download after the base Fossa 64 and Friendly Fossa 64-2; all install .ISO’s are dropped onto my Ventoy multi-boot USB.

It’s amazing what built-in help can do for a system in terms of user-friendliness! Both Friendly variants each had a conspicuous help directory on their desktops, which the official Fossa64 build lacked. I’m impressed with how easy answers seem to be if I just take the time to explore those, various settings, or miscellaneous tooltips. This is a distro for people who aren’t ready for the command line. I just haven’t successfully loaded a pupfile (computer session save file) yet.

were a big improvement over their official Fossa 64 build thanks to a conspicuous directory on the desktop and various other help tooltips. I’m impressed with how easy it is to find my own answer if I just explore. I’m not a fan of the exact graphical style, but if ever there were one distro for people scared of the command line, this would be it – provided I can figure out how to load a pupfile.

Puppy works by copying everything into RAM. It first loads a base image, then modifies it with a “pupfile” made using that image when you shutdown and save a session. If I understand things correctly, you should only save sessions where you tweak system settings. Otherwise, data goes on mounted drives, where it stays regardless of pupsaves. I could be wrong though. Either way, this makes it almost trivial to flush out a virus by rebooting.

So far, I’ve burned the install media to CD and done a lot of exploring. I will need to come back to this.

Takeaway

I’m not a fan of the exact graphical style, and I still have much to learn. While Puppy takes a massively different approach to personal computing than mainstream operating systems, it’s overall one I can see myself recommending to people looking to learn Linux.

Final Question

What is the most unusual computer configuration you’ve used?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Socials.

Works Cited

[1] Puppy Linux Team, “About Puppy Linux,” puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io 2020. [Online]. Available: https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/. [Accessed: Jan. 2, 2023].

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A Bit About Wii Firmware

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a smaller thought for the week. Let’s get started!

I mentioned last week how my family picked up a replacement Wii for Thanksgiving this year. Most everything appeared to be working at first, but when my sister, Taz (Tzarina8472), found Animal Crossing: City Folk needed a firmware update to play. I’m planning to hack this Wii at some point to get on its large homebrew scene, but firmware updates can patch out needed vulnerabilities.

My early research hinted that any version would work, but I later confirmed this on WiiBrew.org [1], whose FAQ’s opening introduces itself as an authoritative reference. All firmware versions have exploits, but updating to or past version 4.2 risks a system brick, and the WiiBrew FAQ does not recommended it for any Wii.

If there exists some website that lists what Wii games need what firmware, I couldn’t find it. Turns out games that may need a firmware update come bundled with the version they need. Luckily, the problematic 4.2 firmware was released the year after this of Animal Crossing. The system went from firmware version 3.2 to 3.3 (best guess from memory).

Final Question

What would you do with a freshly hacked Wii?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Socials.

Work Cited

[1] “Wii Brew,” WiiBrew.org, Nov. 18, 2021. [Online]. available: www.wiibrew.org/wiki/Main_Page [Accessed Dec. 5, 2022].

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I Want to Power On Without the Power Button

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

Booting Without the Power Button

I retired my laptop as a server primarily over a broken load-bearing clip on the screen’s bezel. As I now have to be more careful than I can be in regular use, I want to minimize how often I open or close the lid. The power button is under the lid. A month or so ago, I told it to reboot over Cockpit, a web admin interface, and the web interface remained down. Only this week did I open the lid to the background of my login screen.

Without considering the actual problem, I marched along research for booting with lid closed. Options for this kind of thing are either limited or use different keywords than I think of. My options consolidated into the following: “Wake on LAN,” “Wake on USB,” “Wake on AC.” Wake on LAN allows other computers to power on a device with a special packet. Wake on USB was an option I found for the look-see in my BIOS under a similar name, but its help description implied it was only for when the computer was asleep and would work for a cold boot or perhaps even with Linux.

Wake on AC is an option I have witnessed before and even used without understanding it for a fair booth I once helped with long ago when it was defaulted on for a system. I reached out to multiple places for help with this one, and am still to hear back. No option appears in my BIOS menu, but rumors exist about hidden options or recovery modes. I have been unsuccessful in accessing any such modes so far.

Open Source BIOS Replacements

While it’s easy to think of BIOS as essentially part of the hardware, it’s actually a category of software called firmware, and it can be swapped out like an operating system. On the other hand, open source BIOS alternatives suffer from the same challenges as replacement operating systems for smartphones: every model of motherboard potentially has a tailored BIOS to run it, meaning it can take a while reverse engineer and get working properly.

My I focused my attention on two projects called Coreboot and Libreboot (Libre-boot, not Lib-reboot). Both are open source projects. Coreboot is willing to grab proprietary, closed-source blobs of binary data to increase their availability to enthusiasts. Libreboot’s mission is 100% open source booting at the cost of more extensive work to communicate with different chipsets. Neither project lists my laptop model as supported. On the other hand, I recognized System76 on Coreboot’s list of vendors.

All I wanted was to boot without my power button. Is that too much to ask?

Takeaway

In the end, I worked on the wrong problem this week. I misdiagnosed my symptoms with a valid concern, but even if I pulled it off this week, Cockpit still does not start until I’m logged in, and that’s kind of important when physical access is less than immediate.

Final Question

Have you ever gone off working on an issue you hadn’t actually run into yet?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.

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I Archived Two Old Hard Disks

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

Who doesn’t have a few hard drives from previous computers laying around? Not my family anyway. The first one I dealt with is a Quantum Fireball KX with my father’s name written on it. More importantly: it uses a legacy PATA connection for data, and with the transition away from SATA to M.2 well underway, the time for preservation is now.

My early attempts revolved around a PCI card for a PATA adapter. Long story short: I was never able to boot with the Fireball hooked into my system. I tried different combinations on the jumper pins along with position on the cable. I was never able to access the BIOS. All I got was a freeze mid-power-on-beep or a failed attempt to boot to the hard disk after hearing it spinning up. I verified the card and cable by testing them with CD/DVD reader/burners also from the PATA era.

Aware that the Fireball might be burned out, we ordered a multi-adapter so I could connect it over USB – without having to fight for the BIOS. It mounted right up. I used rsync to dump the contents to GoldenOakLibry, my family’s network storage. Along the way, I came across devhints.io [1]. It looks like an amazing resource. It helped me out wrangling rsync quickly. It has one of the highly exclusive places in my bookmarks list. My only complaint is how interesting Mr. Cruz made his site to cite. Most importantly, I wrote out a sticky note about when and where I dumped the drive.

The second drive (branded Deskstar, SATA connector) took way too long. I was the fool for putting it over Wi-Fi, and I paid for it. Several times, rsync would appear to stall as it got to a larger file. A couple such times, I figured the drive was overheating due to no circulation so I stopped rsync, powered it off, and let it cool down. The breakthrough was pulling up a utility to show my network data.

There was a rather important incident I feel inclined to report before wrapping up. At one point, I accidentally caught a cord connected to the adapter. The drive tumbled off my desk, but I barely managed to catch it after a fumble or two. My worst fear was that of a “head crash,” where the read-write head contacts the spinning platter, leaving a scratch and destroying the data on it. If anything, the slow Wi-Fi speed worked in my favor, because the head was off where it won’t do any harm during an impact.

Takeaway

Data preservation is a chore. In retrospect, I should have performed this procedure exclusively over a wired connection – I should have investigated the possibility of mounting it to GoldenOakLibry directly.

Final Question

What kinds of “digital chores” turned out more memorable than you’d have cared for?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.

Work Cited

[1] R. Cruz “Rsync cheatsheet”devhints.io, [Online]. Available:https://devhints.io/rsync [Accessed: Aug 22, 2022].

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My Manjaro Melted Down

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

Surprise! Bad Manjaro update. I seem to be getting them once a year. I rebooted some time last Wednesday, seemingly to a black screen. My first thought this time wasn’t, “Oh, no! What am I going to do?” so much as, “Ugg, I need to refresh my memory on chroot and manual updating with pacman, skills I’ve only used once or twice before.”

No need to go through all the trouble if it’s not actually necessary. Manjaro has a feature where you can boot from one of an installed list of kernels, and I was seeing that list. Every option failed though – the most I ever got was an emergency shell that didn’t aknowledge the keyboard enough to toggle number or caps locks. This install wasn’t going to fix itself.

My first thought was to grab the Debian drive from ButtonMash, but I’d rather not mess up the only known working drive for scanning pictures. Instead, I riffled through my thumb drive collection and located one with Debian 11 install media. I got on Derpy Chips, my other daily driver workstation, and installed balenaEtcher special to safely make a new Manjaro live USB/install media.

During this time, I was researching the problem. Other people were talking about it within the past month, but I didn’t pick up the actual reason – just something about most Linux kernel 5.x versions being incompatible with a change. Do not cite me on this. I also learned a bit about the command:

manjaro-chroot -a

This command came in handy. The actual repair consisted of me booting to the live media, mounting my main Manjaro drive (graphically, even), going over to it in terminal, changing root directory per the above command, and updating with

pacman -Syyu

If it actually did anything, I didn’t discern anything. I rebooted to confirm it was still broken to find things seemingly repaired. Was it ever broken? Did I actually fix it? I may never know. In either case, I installed a 4.x kernel listed under KDE’s system settings program on the off chance my successful reboot was a fluke. A further reboot held true.

Takeaway

This fix was only done within 24 hours and no interactive help because I’ve already knew all of the needed skills already. Unfortunately, as I finish writing this post, more update shenanigans appear to be inbound. It appears a new package conflicts with one called wxgtk-common but doesn’t satisfy wxgtk2’s requirements for it.

Final Question

Were you affected by these or a similar Manjaro update?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.

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I Upgraded Linux Mint Two Whole Versions

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

Linux Mint is known for being one of the easiest distributions to use when switching from Windows, so that’s why I chose it when I assembled a desktop for my father. The only catch –or so I heard– was that you’re basically stuck reinstalling every time you need to upgrade. Or are you?

Clues here and there hint otherwise. Long story short, I found a few guides. The gist of them is generally to update/upgrade packages, backup, then system upgrade. The Mint 18.x repositories are shut down, but the underlying Ubuntu ones still work. I went on to backup the home directory, then use a recommended utility called Timeshift to create another time-consuming backup.

I tried following one to upgrade to Mint 20, but 18.3 insisted on Mint 19 and 19 on 19.3. The jump to 20 was a lot longer, requiring the sudo password multiple times along the way. A couple days later, after things were starting to settle, I spotted Mint 20.3, and struggled upgrading to that trying to follow the same principals as before. Turns out there are multiple ways to upgrade, and not all of them work for each upgrade. The Linux Mint User Guide has a page linking to blog posts about each step in the upgrade path from Mint 17 to present [1].

Takeaway

I doubt I would trust someone who only knows how to update/upgrade/install packages unless he was up to failure/frustration/learning cycles. On the other hand, that is why using a utility like Timeshift is important.

My recommendation for Mint users who haven’t learned the command line is to back up their home directory and restore it after a clean install.

Final Question

Do you schedule backups for your computer systems?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.

Work Cited

[1] Linux Mint Revision 52875d62, “Docs >> Upgrades,” The Linux Mint User Guide, 2020, [Online]. Available: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade.html. [Accessed June 19, 2022].

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I Switched My Operations to Caddy Web Server

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am rebuilding my home server, Button Mash, from the operating system up. Let’s get started!

Caddy Over Nginx

I spent well over a month obsessing over Nginx, so why would I start over now? As far as I am concerned, Caddy is the piece of software for my use case. While I am sure Nginx is great at what it does, I keep slamming into its learning curve – especially with integrating Let’s Encrypt, a tool for automating SSL encryption (HTTPS/the green padlock). Caddy builds that functionality in while still doing everything I wanted Nginx for.

The official Caddy install instructions [1] for Fedora, Red Hat, and CentOS systems are as follows:

$ dnf install ‘dnf-command(copr)’
$ dnf copr enable @caddy/caddy
$ dnf install caddy

First of all, new command: copr. Background research time! COPR (Cool Other Package Repositories) is a Fedora project I feel comfortable comparing to the Arch User Repository (AUR) or Personal Package Archive (PPA): it lets users make their own software repositories.

Installation went smoothly. When I enabled the repository, I had to accept a GPG key that wasn’t mentioned in the instructions at all. From a user point of view, they appear to fill a similar purpose here to a SSH keys: special numbers use math to prove you are still you in case you get lost.

Caddy uses an HTML interface (a REST API – Don’t ask, I don’t understand myself) on the computer’s internal network known as loopback or localhost on port 2019. Caddy additionally serves everything over HTTPS by default. If it cannot convince Let’s Encrypt to give it a security certificate, it will sign one itself and tell the operating system to trust it. In other words, if I were not running ButtonMash headless (without a graphical interface), I’d be able to try connecting to localhost:2019 with a favorite browser, like at least one of the limited supply of Caddy tutorials did.

IP Range Transplant

I should have just done my experimentation on DerpyChips or something. Instead, I pressed on with trying to point a family-owned domain name at Button Mash. This side adventure sprouted into last week’s post. In short: ButtonMash’s static IP kept was in conflict with what my ISP-provided equipment kept trying to assign it, resulting in an estimated 50% downtime from a confused router. Upgrading to the next gateway may have allowed us to free up the IP range for the gaming router’s use, but it’s not out for our area yet. My father and I switched our network connections over to a “gaming router” we had laying about and enabled bridge mode on the gateway to supposedly disable its router part. I have my doubts about how it’s actually implemented.

Most of our computers gladly accepted the new IP range, but GoldenOakLibry and ButtonMash –having static IP’s– were holdouts. I temporarily reactivated a few lines of configuration on my laptop to set a static IP so I could talk with them directly and manually transfer them over to the new IP range, breaking NFS shares and Vaultwarden on them respectively.

In the confusion, ButtonMash lost its DNS settings; those were easy enough to fix by copying a config line to point those requests to the router. GoldenOakLibry took a bit longer to figure out because the NFS shares themselves had to accept traffic from the new IP range with settings buried deep within the web interface. Once that was sorted, I had to adjust the .mount files in or around /etc/systemd/system on several computers. Editing note: While trying to upload, I found I could not access GoldenOakLibry on at least a couple of my machines. Note 2: I had to change the DHCP settings to the new IP range on my Raspberry Pi reverse Wi-Fi router. Systemd on both goofed systems needed a “swift kick” to fix them.

sudo systemctl start <mount-path-with-hyphens>.mount

Repairs Incomplete

That left Vaultwarden. I was already in a it’s-broken:-fix-it-properly mentality from the modem/router spinoff project. I got as far as briefly forwarding the needed ports for an incompletely configured Caddy to respond with an error message before deciding I wanted to ensure Bitwarden was locked down tightly before exposing it to the Internet. That wasn’t happening without learning Caddy’s reverse proxy, as I put Vaultwarden exclusively onto a loopback port.

Speaking of loopback, I found the official Caddy tutorials lacking. They –like many others after them– never consider a pupil with a headless server. I have not yet figured out how to properly convince my other computers to trust Caddy’s self-signed certificates and open up the administration endpoint. That will come in another post. I did get it to serve stuff over HTTP by listing IP’s as http://<LAN address>, but Bitwarden/Vaultwarden won’t let me log in on plain HTTP, even over a trusted network and confine the annoying log to a file.

As far as I can tell, the administration API on port 2019 does not serve a normal web page. Despite my efforts, the most access I have gotten to it was for it to error out with “host not allowed.” I haven’t made total sense of it yet. I recognize some of the jargon being used, but its exact mechanics are beyond me for the time being.

Takeaway

Caddy is a powerful tool. The documentation is aesthetically presented and easy enough to understand if you aren’t skimming. But you will have a much better time teaching yourself when you aren’t trying to learn it over the network like I did.

Final Question

Do you know Caddy? I can tell I’m close, but I can’t know for sure if I’m there in terms of the HTTP API and just don’t recognize it yet. I look forward hearing from you in the comments below or on my Discord server.

Works Cited

[1] “Install,” Caddy Documentation. [Online], Available: https://caddyserver.com/docs/install. [Accessed: June 6, 2022].

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Patience is a Virtue When Internet Breaks

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

It’s the last Monday of the month. I should have a larger project this week, but I had to split a step off into a prequel of sorts when it ballooned on me. For reasons I will go into next week, I ended up talking with tech support for my Internet provider.

It all started when I logged into my router’s off-site network settings (WHY??? is this a thing?) so I could forward a couple ports to Button Mash, my home server, when I noticed it alternating between two internal IP’s: the static IP I configured it to call itself and another one I thought was assigned to another [possibly decommissioned at present] Raspberry Pi – or it may have been a setting I never fully cleaned up. I have no way to tell.

Additionally, I learned that the online toy they’re having me use to try and manage the network is being retired. They want me to use their app I don’t want on the phone I don’t carry. No thanks. I’d rather move my whole network over to this 3rd party gaming router we have on hand.

Support Begins

Friday before posting: On my first session with support, I got a live agent after complaining to their help bot that it hated me. When I shared how I wanted to use my own router, the agent mentioned “bridge mode,” an option I had noted in the gateway’s admin panel. We continued by poking at my Manjaro workstation’s 10 Mbps connection speed with little luck because I was using a different computer.

Sunday: I got into chat with an agent on my now 3.5 Mbps connection. To not-my surprise, the obligatory reboot everything between me and the Internet didn’t change much. I told him no fewer than two or three times that I was on desktop, not phone; I do not have mobile data to remain connected; no, I do not think my family is interested in a coupon for this streaming service you’re offering; this is my one and only means of connecting to you. I followed my given instructions and pressed a button on the back of the gateway for an unusually long time. The Internet did not come back on.

Level 2

My father called a number given to me by the second chat agent, and we were connected with an awesome “Level 2” agent who could follow along as I described my unique home network while repairing the damage done by a factory reset. When bridge mode came up, I figured we might as well fix it how we want if it’s already broken and we have a professional on the line. He had some sudden technical issues of his own an hour plus into helping us.

We called back and got someone whom I had to remind a couple times that Debian 10 does not mean Windows 10. Nevertheless, he got the idea through to us that moving/disabling the default IP range was not a feature our gateway supports. I read something as much in a forum post; it said something about Layer 2 network devices, but that’s homework for a future topic.

The first guy called back just as I was giving into despair with the second guy. Long story short: our network is at around 80%; ButtonMash and GoldenOakLibry, our server and network storage, are configured with static IP’s and don’t show up at all right now. The awesome agent suggested upgrading to the next router, which might not be hard coded to serve its default IP range, allowing me to swap IP ranges between gateway and router. I don’t want to manually configure all my computers to find GoldenOakLibry at a new IP.

Takeaway

A lot of going through tech support as a customer is about explaining your exact situation to however many agents you may come into contact with.

Special thanks to Mr. E on my family’s personal Discord server for the suggestion of disabling the gateway’s integrated router.

Final Question

Have you ever had tech support struggling to keep up with you?

I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.

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