Death of a Note II

My Note II died yesterday.

It rebooted in the middle of nothing, then went to the startup / boot screen.  Quite normal. But it wouldn’t leave that screen.  So I pulled the battery.  Put it back.  Same thing, booted to the normal screen.

No worries I thought, I’ll just boot into recovery.  The recovery would start, then crash.  No menu, no options.  Didn’t look good.  I tried to flash stock using ODIN.  Kept failing with write errors, then it wouldn’t even boot up anymore.  A few more attempts, flashing the PIT file etc and now it’s deader than dead.

Galaxy Note 2

Galaxy Note 2

I guess the EMMC chip has gone.  Alas.  It was a good phone, if a little laggy.  Well, a lot laggy.  That’s the reason I’m just waiting on my Nexus 6 to arrive, which should be any day now.

I’ll never buy another Samsung again.

Raspberry Pi

My Pi arrived yesterday.  I plugged it in for 30 minutes while I baked a cake for Sarah’s birthday. Seems pretty neat, I’m impressed that the distribution I chose to test with (OpenELEC) detected the Wifi Dongle straight away and just worked with it.

The major issue at the moment is I don’t have a decently sized MicroSD card.   I have a 2G one, which was fine for some basic testing.  And it’s actually fine for OpenELEC as well, but it’s a GUI oriented thing and I don’t want that, I want something that’s basically a Linux Distro (i.e. Rasbian)

Will have to get it a decent SD Card today.  And the case that my workmate 3D Printed for it should be arriving in the next day or two.

I’ll be crabbed off if I can’t get grsecurity running on it…

Fingers Crosssed

Hello,

I am writing to kindly ask that my $1 “Other ATM” fee this morning be refunded. I had to go to the smelly Westpac ATM because the ASB ATM in Taradale was out of service.

I trust you will see kindness in your heart and realise that I would be much better to spend that $1 on a Mars Bar for a morning snack.

Yours in a dislike of Fees,

Tim

Update: I got my $1 back.

ASB Bank and TOR

Sometime in early December I thought I’d have a play with TOR.  I ran it up on micro and played with it for a few days.  I thought I’d “help the TOR world” by running an exit node, seeing as we have more bandwidth allocated to us than we use.

After a few days though I figured hell, I probably wasn’t doing much to help, so I turned it off and forgot about it.

Fast forward to a few weeks later:  Suddenly my wife can’t get to a website she needs to access.  Do some digging, turns out that it works from other IP’s, just not our home IP.  Our home IP is static, so I can’t just reboot and get a new one.  I email the people running the website and to my surprise, they’re very helpful.  They investigate and tell me that due to my IP having been a TOR node, it’s been blacklisted.  Their network gear auto-updates a blacklist every few weeks, so if we’re not longer a TOR node we should be removed.

No worries, I put a bypass in place in our home router, using OpenVPN.  Annoying, but it works.  A couple of weeks later they email me to tell me that it’s all sorted now. I remove the bypass and their site still works. Thanks!

Then ASB FastNet stops working. Both the website and their Mobile App (which accesses MobileAPI.asbbank.co.nz, a different IP than the Browser site.)  Argh!

I can’t get a single communication out of them as to why it doesn’t work, but trying to connection to FastNet classic gives me:
micro:~> curl -vv -I https://fnc.asbbank.co.nz
* About to connect() to fnc.asbbank.co.nz port 443 (#0)
* Trying 210.55.180.58...
* Connection refused
* couldn't connect to host
* Closing connection #0
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host

Which is quite annoying.  So I have an OpenVPN bypass in place for it as well.  The problem is my OpenVPN bypass is quite flakey, mostly due to the way I’ve setup OpenVPN.  It doesn’t reconnect properly when the tunnel drops, which it does every now and then on the end of a consumer grade Internet Service.

Can I get hold of anyone at ASB to help me?  Tell me why the IP’s blacklisted?  Nope.  I’ve emailed, prodded.  Very frustrating.  Please, someone at ASB in the Network Team get in contact.  Tell me what I can do to get removed/get this fixed.

Thanks,

Tim

Update: ASB use BrightCloud’s IP Reputation service.  Once I filed a request with Brightcloud and they verified we weren’t a TOR exit node anymore, they updated the status of our IP address and we can once again access ASB directly.  Thanks ASB for getting back to me after I made a lot of noise…