Excuse me, Java? Stop clobberinng my network stack!


  • Garbage Person

    My dad's PC has been exhibiting this seemingly random issue where TCP/IP traffic over the nic would cease, and the only way to get it back (indeed, the only way to be able to even toggle the NIC's up/down state) would be to reboot. "Shitty NIC driver" I thought. It is, after all, a VIA motherboard with VIA's idiotic in-house NIC.

    My nephew swore it had something to do with an auto-updater. I decided he was full of it, because how the fuck could that even happen?

     

    And then I saw it for myself.  The JRE autoupdater popped a UAC dialog asking for permission to bring Oracle's newest and lamest home for dinner. I said no. The network went out.

    God dammit.



  •  So... you instructed him to click "yes" after that? 


  • Garbage Person

    @Schlagwerk said:

     So... you instructed him to click "yes" after that? 

    No, because for sanity's sake I have the only admin account - and the fucking Java updater is nowhere to be found until it just magically shows up on its own time. So I couldn't invoke it manually. I had to manually install a new JRE. Which is another WTF.


  • @Weng said:

    @Schlagwerk said:

     So... you instructed him to click "yes" after that? 

    No, because for sanity's sake I have the only admin account - and the fucking Java updater is nowhere to be found until it just magically shows up on its own time. So I couldn't invoke it manually. I had to manually install a new JRE. Which is another WTF.

    It's been a long time since the JRE has updated automatically for me; I can't recall it ever working on Vista or 7. My only guess is that the updater can't hold onto my admin user elevation and keeps demoting itself back to a normal user, but it's just JRE so I can't really be arsed to care if it works or not.



  •  You know, I just had a similar problem where I couldn't get any decent speed where name resolution was concerned, and while just doing regular cleaning work, disabled the Java updater startup.  I figured just cleaning all the cache's fixed it, but it might well have been Java.


  • Garbage Person

    Totally possible - between Java being shit, Sun being shit, and Oracle being shit, I'm pretty sure ANYTHING is possible.

    But in this case, it wasn't borking name resolution - it was borking the whole stack.

    I've wiresharked it at the switch - NOTHING goes through.



  • I guess it is better if Java is not working than if you have a Java 6u23 or older, since a vulnerability in the Java plugin of those versions is used a lot to spread drive-by downloads and malware...

    If you don't need it, disable the Java plugin, if you need it, update it at least to 6u24.



  • JRE keeps telling me it downloaded a new update and asking me if I wanted to install it every time I log into a student computer at my school. Needless to say, I don't have the privileges to do an update, nor does it even try to ask for an admin password or something (it's XP, of course, so no UAC anyway). There is no way to disable the bloody auto updater either unless I had admin privileges to remove it from autorun...

    (Actually, on these systems there are TONS of background processes running, like at least 2 disk space quota controlling things... as I understand it, there's (1) something that copies a user folder to C:\Documents and Settings\ on every login from the server and copies it back on logout (occasionally deleting the local version I guess), and (2) a network drive that gets auto-connected. It's a WTF.)



  • I get weird behavior in Java applications listening on ports if I install network drivers while they're running. Lots of exceptions generated in the native backend until I reboot.



  • The strangest error I ever got with Java was with a game called Free Alledgiance, which I used to play years ago. Massive multiplayer online spaceship combat simulator, so you had to log to the servers to be able to play anything but the tutorial. The game was made in .NET and didn't have a single line of Java in it, but in Vista it would not connect at all to any server if you had Java installed. But if you uninstalled Java, you could play it just fine.

    If I remember well, that happened because no application could listen to a given port should a certain version of Java be installed. And Free Alledgiance just happened to use that port. It was fixed in some later version of Java.



  • [quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]And Free Alledgiance just happened to use that port.[/quote]

    Would be nice if ports were identified by an 8-character ASCII sequence or something. Always found that numbering system to be a bit archaic.


  • Garbage Person

    @nexekho said:

    [quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]And Free Alledgiance just happened to use that port.

    Would be nice if ports were identified by an 8-character ASCII sequence or something. Always found that numbering system to be a bit archaic.[/quote] Yeah - and 65535 of them isn't nearly enough.



  • @Weng said:

    No, because for sanity's sake I have the only admin
    account - and the fucking Java updater is nowhere to be found until it
    just magically shows up on its own time. So I couldn't invoke it
    manually.
    Control Panel->Java->Update

    @rad131304 said:

    It's been a long time since the JRE has updated automatically for me; I can't recall it ever working on Vista or 7.
    You have to log in as an administrator to get the updater to work. I've learned to click “No,” switch to my administrator account, and start it manually if it doesn’t pop up again on login.


  • Garbage Person

    @Sir Twist said:

    Control Panel->Java->Update
    Why the cocksucking judderfuck does Java think it needs a CPL? And why the fuck is the updater there?



  • @Sir Twist said:

    Control Panel->Java->Update

    I know I have disabled Java's auto update before (which doesn't stop the auto updater threat from autorunning; I had to delete that manually from the registry last time I checked), but the option just isn't available on the (part of the?) Java CPL applet that I can open on those student computers. Again, I'm not an admin, so can't open Control Panel manually... it just opens some Java settings from that pesky systray icon it shows me.



  • @derula said:

    as I understand it, there's (1) something that copies a user folder to C:\Documents and Settings\ on every login from the server and copies it back on logout (occasionally deleting the local version I guess), and (2) a network drive that gets auto-connected. It's a WTF.)

    Sounds like perfectly standard roaming profile + mounted homedir AD-based setup to me?

    And speaking of roaming profiles and Java WTFs... have you ever noticed that the "full" Java installer drops a copy of the whole MSI (20MB for JRE, 75 for JDK) into ROAMING part of AppData, into a directory named after version? I was recently doing cleanup on the profile server, and freed over ten blasted gigabytes of those. Some users had as much as six different versions there.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Sounds like perfectly standard roaming profile + mounted homedir AD-based setup to me?

    I dunno, to be honest it's the only network setup I've seen, but I'd find it more logical to have only one folder and not having to push around files on login/out... can't you do that with Windows? Thinking about it, "streaming" the user.dat from a remote server is probably not a perfectly good idea... Anyway my actual point was that there's always 2 programs running who somehow control the quota (I think at least one of which is not even a Microsoft tool), and I thought this should be possible with built-in OS features themselves, like NTFS has some quota system right? Well idk, maybe I'm just wrong, but then, TRWTF is Windows; I mean it allows remote logins, why would it not include the necessary features to give the user profile space?



  • Java has an auto-updater?

    Oh yeah... that thing that never actually updates anything and occasionally frequently crashes for no apparent reason? (On two different computers. I think it's only ever updated [or even asked me if I wanted to update] without crashing once. Ever.)

     



  • @derula said:

    I dunno, to be honest it's the only network setup I've seen, but I'd find it more logical to have only one folder and not having to push around files on login/out... can't you do that with Windows?

    Positives of roaming profiles:

    • Allow you to work offline when disconnected from the network
    • Make the dumb apps that depend on locking, mem-mapping, or other not-available-over-network features work
    • Avoid the "more than one workstation accessing the same file on the server" problem

    Negatives of roaming profiles:
    • Copy a lot of data back and forth, uses local disk space
    • Sometimes gets confused, creates duplicate junk on local disk, doesn't load at all and dumps to emergency desktop, so on
    • There's the issue of merging changes to/from the server

    @derula said:
    Thinking about it, "streaming" the user.dat from a remote server is probably not a perfectly good idea...

    Actually, that would be the easiest part... Registry is accessible only via system API, so only system needs to communicate with the server, and coud use some optimized protocol for that... but nooooo, it's indeed treated as every other file and copied back and forth (And sometimes NOT copied back becuase some badly written system service or driver keeps it open after you logged out.)

    @derula said:
    Anyway my actual point was that there's always 2 programs running who somehow control the quota (I think at least one of which is not even a Microsoft tool), and I thought this should be possible with built-in OS features themselves, like NTFS has some quota system right?

    Yes, it's part of NTFS, and I'm 95% sure it can be set network-wide by Group Policy. Third party apps for that are a big WTF.

    @derula said:
    Well idk, maybe I'm just wrong, but then, TRWTF is Windows; I mean it allows remote logins, why would it not include the necessary features to give the user profile space?

    Backward Compatibility(tm) for one, working offline for the other. Remember, this is system meant for corporations; do you really want people to not be able to log in and/or access "their desktop and documents" when they undock the laptop from company network and go off-site?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @nexekho said:

    [quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]And Free Alledgiance just happened to use that port.

    Would be nice if ports were identified by an 8-character ASCII sequence or something. Always found that numbering system to be a bit archaic.[/quote]C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\services



    getservbyname() in php, perl, C, etc.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    (roaming profiles information)

    Thanks, I guess I can see now why you'd have that combination, though it still seems questionable in my scenario. But oh well, those are the same guys that have this kind of spam prevention (I've posted about this before, but they have now updated the site and still have the same shit mechanism in place): Go here and click any of the e-mail links. View source. Yep, this site tells you that it's there for theft prevention, yet the address is right in the source code in plain text. Maybe they're checking the user agent or something, hoping that all the mail address collecting bots will be honest about their nature instead of pretending to be IE7 on Windows XP. I dunno, it's weird.



  • Re: Excuse me, Java? Stop clobbering my network stack!

    @derula said:

    TRWTF is Windows; I mean it allows remote logins, why would it not include the necessary features to give the user profile space?

    Don't confuse "what Windows allows" with "what your system admin, who may be a moron, set Windows up to do." Why would you assume Windows doesn't have the ability to put the user profile on a network? Fucking Windows NT4 had that ability.

    Our network at work used to use roaming profiles, which works better with laptops, BTW, if you're looking for why anybody would use it. Now it has a hybrid where if you log in while on the network, it just mounts your home directory from a network share, and if the network loses connectivity it uses the Offline Files feature to keep track of changes/collisions.

    It works pretty well. We can still log on to any computer in the office and have access to our files, our laptops still work without a network, and the system copes pretty well if I'm logged on to two computers simultaneously. The disadvantage is that now some apps, like Visual Studio, gripe that they're saving files to a network drive which they consider a "insecure location".

    But here's the real point: your network may have been set up by a moron! Windows is a tool. Like any other tool, it can be abused horribly. It's no different from Linux or OS X in this respect. So it's stupid to blame the OS if you see a stupid network install. Just because your (possibly moron) admin isn't using a feature doesn't mean the feature doesn't exist.



  • @derula said:

    Maybe they're checking the user agent or something, hoping that all the mail address collecting bots will be honest about their nature instead of pretending to be IE7 on Windows XP.

    I'd bet they're not just hoping the mail address collecting bots are honest about their nature rather than pretending to be IE7 or something.  However, back when I was an email administrator, I was always surprised at just how much spam was caught by our rule to block 'X-mailer: The Bat!' (from memory, so it's probably off a lot.)  Yes, we checked it periodically for false positives.  We even got some complaints from some of the people sending the messages, saying that their users were complaining they weren't getting their email.  We responded to those, telling them to have their users complain to us.  We never got complaints from our users that we were blocking 'The Bat' emails.

    For the curious: yes, it's trivial to get the bat to use a different X-mailer line.  But blocking the default value for it worked wonders.  We had many other rules, but this was one of our most effective with no reported false positives.  (We had some which were more effective, but had false positives - the letter 'p' and the letter couplet 'to' come to mind.  Both of those came from our anti-spam vendor, for what it's worth.  Note those were both nearly a decade ago, it's likely we've changed our anti-spam vendor since then.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @derula said:
    TRWTF is Windows; I mean it allows remote logins, why would it not include the necessary features to give the user profile space?

    Don't confuse "what Windows allows" with "what your system admin, who may be a moron, set Windows up to do." Why would you assume Windows doesn't have the ability to put the user profile on a network? Fucking Windows NT4 had that ability.

    You're quoting me out of context; I said (or meant to say, at least) "If Windows can't do that, then TRWTF is Windows." Because I didn't know if it can, you know, I've never been a network administrator. Probably should have used conditional II. My bad.

    @blakeyrat said:

    But here's the real point: your network may have been set up by a moron!

    Yeah it probably was. Really, I'm not disagreeing with you there; I just wasn't informed about things enough and was investigating things. I see how roaming profiles are useful with laptops, I was just confused about the dual scheme which, especially in my case of fixed desktops, didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. I've assumed it was a network admin WTF in the first place, but got confused when it was mentioned that the dual roaming profile / network share was quite common.



  • @derula said:

    You're quoting me out of context

    Sorry, the context was confusing, but I felt confident in what you were saying because:

    @derula said:

    TRWTF is Windows

    You used "is" in that phrase and not "would be".

    In the spirit of the other thread, I apologize for responding without asking a clarifying question first. Like, "what the fuck you sayin', boy?" or, "did you type that sentence after drinking a half gallon of cheap booze?"



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @derula said:
    You're quoting me out of context

    Sorry, the context was confusing, but I felt confident in what you were saying because:

    @derula said:

    TRWTF is Windows

    You used "is" in that phrase and not "would be".

    In the spirit of the other thread, I apologize for responding without asking a clarifying question first. Like, "what the fuck you sayin', boy?" or, "did you type that sentence after drinking a half gallon of cheap booze?"

    I find it really hard to take offense at anything you're saying. Maybe it's because I don't automatically assume that the other person must be wrong whenever I see something I don't understand or disagree with.

    That said, you're right, the sentence was a bit confusing and I should have used "would be" to make it clearer.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @derula said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    In the spirit of the other thread, I apologize for responding without asking a clarifying question first.

    That said, you're right, the sentence was a bit confusing and I should have used "would be" to make it clearer.

    I feel like I don't know you guys any more.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @derula said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    In the spirit of the other thread, I apologize for responding without asking a clarifying question first.

    That said, you're right, the sentence was a bit confusing and I should have used "would be" to make it clearer.

    I feel like I don't know you guys any more.

    Who the fuck are you?



  • @Weng said:

    Totally possible - between Java being shit, Sun being shit, and Oracle being shit, I'm pretty sure ANYTHING is possible.

    But in this case, it wasn't borking name resolution - it was borking the whole stack.

    I've wiresharked it at the switch - NOTHING goes through.

     

    Once the name was resolved it seemed to return to normal speed.  That said, we're talking a name resolution that took 45+ seconds.

     



  • @boomzilla said:

    @derula said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    In the spirit of the other thread, I apologize for responding without asking a clarifying question first.

    That said, you're right, the sentence was a bit confusing and I should have used "would be" to make it clearer.

    I feel like I don't know you guys any more.

    Oh. Uh.

    SUCK A BAG OF COCKS DERULA!!!!

    Better?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    SUCK A BAG OF COCKS DERULA!!!!

    I have no choice but to repeat myself here:

    (>^◡^)> Poyo, poyo!


  • BINNED

    @derula said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    SUCK A BAG OF COCKS DERULA!!!!

    I have no choice but to repeat myself here:

    (>^◡^)> Poyo, poyo!

    You guys should watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rol8RyRKD_U it's damn funny.



  • @topspin said:

    @derula said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    SUCK A BAG OF COCKS DERULA!!!!

    I have no choice but to repeat myself here:

    (>^◡^)> Poyo, poyo!

    You guys should watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rol8RyRKD_U it's damn funny.

    The funny thing is that I'm pretty sure "suck a bag of dicks" originated on SomethingAwful.com. It's always cool to me when you see insular website communities influencing pop culture. Unless it's 4chan. Then it's depressing.

    Edit: I'm listening to that, and it's not very funny-- all he is is taking the obviously ridiculous insult "suck a bag of dicks" and treating it as if it was meant literally. Not funny. I'm 4 minutes in and I haven't laughed once.


  • BINNED

    Well, maybe it's because I've seen it in context (i.e. the whole show) or it's because I'm English as 2nd language speaker. It's probably the childish bluntness that's making it funny.

    Humor is different across people, though.


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    The funny thing is that I'm pretty sure "suck a bag of dicks" originated on SomethingAwful.com. It's always cool to me when you see insular website communities influencing pop culture.
    SA isn't really all that insular.If you actually ask IRL, you're prettymuch guaranteed to know at least one goon.

    In addition, there's a buttload of cross-pollination with other communities.

     

    SA only looks insular because they have the best antispam procedure on earth.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Weng said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    The funny thing is that I'm pretty sure "suck a bag of dicks" originated on SomethingAwful.com. It's always cool to me when you see insular website communities influencing pop culture.

    SA isn't really all that insular.If you actually ask IRL, you're prettymuch guaranteed to know at least one goon.


    Pretty much any on line community could be considered insular compared with "pop culture" in general. Of course, whether "suck a bag of dicks" is really that prevalent is probably an open question. Of course, even things that seem like they're huge in terms of pop culture can be fairly limited in their scope. Especially with how compartmentalized the culture has become.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Of course, even things that seem like they're huge in terms of pop culture can be fairly limited in their scope. Especially with how compartmentalized the culture has become.
     

    As I was reminded not long ago when people starting claiming "that's what *she* said" originated on a TV show I don't even watch.

    And before that when I referred to "Don't Stop Believing" as a song "made newly popular in the Sopranos finale".  I don't watch Glee.  I have a penis.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I'm listening to that, and it's not very funny-- all he is is taking the obviously ridiculous insult "suck a bag of dicks" and treating it as if it was meant literally. Not funny. I'm 4 minutes in and I haven't laughed once.
     

    Oh. Psh. It's funny.

    Maybe this and this and this is more your style.



  • @da Doctah said:

    I don't watch Glee.  I have a penis.

    Hmmm, proof?

    Considering your avatar you need to back that claim

    Also a lot of people have a penis and watch musicals (not that I care or watch them)


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @serguey123 said:

    Also a lot of people have a penis and watch musicals (not that I care or watch them)

    Sure, but do Marx Brothers movies really count in the spirit of the claim?





  • @serguey123 said:

    Also a lot of people have a penis and watch musicals (not that I care or watch them)

    Are you counting comedies-that-happen-to-be-musicals? Like The Court Jester? Because I have a penis (just checked to make sure), and I love that movie. The Pellet with the Poison bit is the best thing ever. The pellet with the poison is in the flagon with the dragon, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true! The songs are all pretty awesome, too.

    Ditto: Southpark: Bigger, Longer and Uncut; Little Shop of Horrors.

    I also like the the 1972 version of Man of La Mancha, mostly because it includes the 1972 version of Sophia Loren in a serving wench outfit.



  • @boomzilla, blakeyrat or  blakezilla said:

    @serguey123 said:
    Also a lot of people have a penis and watch musicals (not that I care or watch them)
    Sure, but do Marx Brothers movies really count in the spirit of the claim?

    Are you counting comedies-that-happen-to-be-musicals? Like The Court Jester? Because I have a penis (just checked to make sure), and I love that movie. The <FONT color=#698d73>Pellet with the Poison</FONT> bit is the best thing ever. The pellet with the poison is in the flagon with the dragon, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true! The songs are <FONT color=#698d73>all pretty</FONT> <FONT color=#698d73>awesome</FONT>, too.

    Ditto: Southpark: Bigger, Longer and Uncut; Little Shop of Horrors.

    I also like the the 1972 version of Man of La Mancha, mostly because it includes the 1972 version of Sophia Loren in a serving wench outfit.

    All types of musicals, and btw gay people unless they opt out still have a penis nor that I care or watch them



  • @Weng said:

    @nexekho said:

    [quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]And Free Alledgiance just happened to use that port.

    Would be nice if ports were identified by an 8-character ASCII sequence or something. Always found that numbering system to be a bit archaic.

    Yeah - and 65535 of them isn't nearly enough.

    [/quote] 64K ought to be enough for anybody.

     



  • @da Doctah said:

    Sopranos finale
    TRWTF

     


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