this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?

tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.

Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)

Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.

However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.

The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.

but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~

Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.

aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2

Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.

Also -- and rather the point of this rant:

It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.

After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.

After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?

Further research.

I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.

However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?

So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.

At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.

For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.

... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!

So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs

Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.

...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;

Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃

Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.

But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970

So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.

So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.

So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.

So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.

Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.

And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.

And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!

Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!

P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".

This is a follow-up of my last rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1323422/...

TLDR; My step-son tripped over my HDD power cord, sending it plummeting towards certain death.

So this is just over a year ago. At this point, my GF and I are married, and she's about 7 months pregnant with our daughter. Her son, Nicolas - the one from the last rant - is 13 years old.

So it was a Saturday, and I had Nicolas helping me to clean up the apartment. My wife was off the hook, because, ya know - she's pregnant.

While I was cleaning the living room, I had Nic cleaning the kitchen/dining room area. At this same time, I had my laptop and a 3Tb external USB hard drive on the dining room table, copying a bunch of data or something. This external HDD also had it's own power cord, which was plugged in next to the table.

Next thing I know, I hear an "Ohp!" followed by a crash. It was the horrifying sound of my hard drive plunging 36 inches off the table towards certain death. And death, it had.

Before even checking, I knew this HDD was dead. It took a lot for me not to snap at the kid. I told him to get out of the kitchen and go clean his room. That hard drive... hadn't been backed up. At all, which is on me. Even more so, since that data was really irreplaceable.

Even knowing that the HDD HAD to be dead, I still plugged it in, hoping for a miracle. I got nothing, it wouldn't even spin up.

$ dmesg -w

Showed that linux saw the USB controller and even the HDD controller (it printed out the manufacturer, SeaGate). The data was valuable enough that I was saving up some money to have the data recovered, which would be about $2,000.

However, before I had saved up enough money... My apartment was broken into and all my external HDD's (and some internal ones I had laying around) were stolen.

Unicode support pl0x.

So I had an Windows account with AzureAD, and my real name has "ő" and "ó" in it, and software that did not support Unicde started flipping the fuck out.

I was intially going with junctioning every bullshit corrupted user folder name that showed up in the ENOENTs to my real user folder, but that didn't solve it for a couple of software.

I was trying to share my drives with Docker, but the same shit occurred. No error message, it just didn't work. I ended up creating a new user account for Docker to share the drive with.

I was trying to use the Travis CLI to set up releases, etc., but it replaced the "ő" with "?". Y U DO THAT?! Common knowledge is that "?" and other special characters cannot be in entity names. SO WHY DO YOU REPLACE THE UNKNOWN CHARACTER IN A PATH WITH THAT? And it wasn't a character not found character either! It was just a straight question mark.

I ended up creating a new user account because I couldn't change the name of the current one because fuck AzureAD, and Windows just decided to FUCKING TRASH MY ACCOUNT. I went over to the new one, copied over some files from the old one, tried to go back to the old one to copy env variables, but I noticed that the account has been purged from the registry... At least the files haven't been deleted.

I ended up reinstalling Windows.

After all my frustration, I recommend all companies with a CLI to visit the following website: http://uplz.skiilaa.me/

Thanks.

So I think I saw a post on here about dvds in virtual machines. Got me thinking, and here's my results trying to play a dvd using linux running inside a vm.

Setup:
Windows 10 Professional
Hyper-V VM running Debian 4.19
Xming website release for video (also works with the free version)
PulseAudio for windows to play sound

So, pretty straightforward, right? Insert DVD, tell Hyper-V to map the dvd drive to the virtual one and run `vlc dvd:///dev/sr0'
But of course, DVDs have copy protection (read: playback protection), so I downloaded the dvdcss package file from videolan's ftp server and installed it. This still didn't work though, vlc said it couldn't decode the dvd. Then, to make sure my dvd was okay I played it with vlc in windows, which worked fine. When I tried again inside the vm it suddenly "worked". Maybe running it inside of a vm prevents some access to the dvd drive required for decoding? Go figure.

The video was very corrupted though, and vlc puked out a lot of errors.

So in conclusion, playing a dvd in a vm is weird, unwatchable, inefficient and only works if you can also play it on the host.

And yes the audio is just as choppy as the video, no idea what causes this. I can play normal videos fine (for some reason that doesn't really work with the free version of xming) although it uses about 200% cpu since there's no hardware acceleration, and the framerate isn't necessarily what it is supposed to be.

rant!

tl;dr
fucked up shithead families with their entitlements
/tl;dr

What a line-up.

https://devrant.com/rants/4504247/...

One would have to be badass to just get out alive such families.

Is it a dev thing to strive for halfway decent acceptance or drive a no shit head policy?
Or just being able to find and accept people on their intent and thrive through (self) improvement?

I cut ties to four fifth of the family because of their meth head characters and the damage they impose on their direct, secondary and third party environment.

Hall of Fame of recent comments :

"If there were no information technology, every human had a job and there were no homeless people."
This brother of mine says to me while I helped him moving to a raging nazi shithole without water, electricity, roof, or sewers.
To the exact only one person of the family working in information technology.
Thanks.

Uhm. No. And there would still be machines and, well, the wheel?
Kthxbye!

The ridiculous and shameful story of how simply "installing Windows" saved my hard drive from the garbage.
(Also update on https://devrant.com/rants/3105365/)

It started with my root partition turning read-only all of a sudden. Some quick search suggested that I should check the sanity of my hard drive, by running a SMART test, which failed of course. I backed up my data using ddrescue and ran a badblocks over the whole thing, which found around 800 unreadable blocks in a row. I was ready to bid farewell to my drive, but as a last resort, instead of the trash, I brought it to this place where they claimed they can repair the damaged hard drives by "surgery".

To my surprise, they returned my drive the next week, saying it is all well now, and charged me 1/8 the price of a new drive, with a refund guarantee if there was a problem in two days. There was a problem right there: I ran another SMART test which failed again, and also the faulty blocks were still unreadable! So I stormed the place and called for my refund, showing the failed SMART report. The only answer I would get from the staff was "Have you tried installing Windows?".

I usually try to be patient in such situations; I really don't like to declare publicly that "not everyone uses that stinky piece of rotten software you call an OS", but their suggestion seemed totally irrelevant! I got all types of IO errors all over the damn thing and they told me to install Windows. Why? Because this was the only test they would rely on. At last I managed to meet the "technician" there and showed him the IO errors: tried to read the bad sectors with dd and failed. He first mumbled somethings like "Have you checked the connector?" or "Are these the same blocks?", but after he ran out of bullshit, he said "Why don't you just install Windows first and see if that helps?" and I was ready to explode in his face!

"You test drives by installing Windows, just because it will make a nasty NTFS partition and probably does an fsck? If you shut your mouth for a sec and open your eyes you'll see this is a shit load of IO errors we got here: You can't install Windows, you can't even make an NTFS here, because it will try to zero-the-fuck-out the damn partition and it will face the same fucking IO error that I'm showing you right now in almost one single fucking system call!"

"I don't know this kind of test you are using. We have our own tests and they've passed successfully. So all I can do is to give you a Windows CD if you want."

"I don't need a Windows CD. I will just try to make an NTFS partition on the error spot and I will fail."

"Ok. Then call me when your done."

I was angry, not only because I felt they're just trying to avoid a refund, but also because I knew I've lost my drive. But just with hope that I could get my money back, I made a small partition over the error spot and ran `mkfs.ntfs` on it. I was ready to show the failure to the guy, but I looked more precisely and saw that "the filesystem was created successfully!" I was sure something is nor write. I then successfully mounted the new partition, write over it and read it again. I even dd'ed the blocks again, and this time there was no IO error. All of a sudden everything was fine.

I didn't know what happened. Maybe it just needed a write, while I'd just tried to read from those blocks. But anyway, I didn't called the technician guy again. I just thanked one of the staff there and said that my problem was solved. I then ran a successful SMART test and then restored my backup. Ridiculous like that.

I'm still not sure if my drive will continue to live with no more problems. I also have no explanation for what happened. (I appreciate any help on this https://superuser.com/questions/...) But I really like to see the look on the poor guy's face when he finds out that trying to install Windows just saved my ass!

Update to https://devrant.com/rants/1415880/...

After numerous emails back and forth my colleague finally came to the conclusion that the customers WSUS is responsible (i might accidentally forgot to mention that in my original mail, oops :) ) but also blamed one of my other colleagues for enabling deduplication on the servers so he can't reliably tell wherever a hard drive is full. (??!?)

But anyway, no beeing sorry for him beeing wrong and impulsively blaming and disabling my scripts, because of course he's not.

I really god damn hate this guy. Were it not for this beeing devRant with a focus on devs i'd have a lot more stories of this special snowflake.