Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Not in the mood to be a sysadmin

I'll write more later, but this gist is things moved very fast today and I was admitted to the hospital this evening to begin treatment tomorrow.

What I can't get over and wanted to rant about (and probably few of you care about it, but it's my blog and I want to rant) is the annoying redirection system they have here where you have to agree to some policy before general Internet access starts working.  Aren't things just supposed to work on a Mac?  Oh yeah, except when they don't.

I finally have things working on my laptop right now, but it required using both ConnectBot on an Android phone and looking at the network settings on an iPhone and some network fiddling on the Mac to get there.  (How do non-tech people deal with this?)  I was actually pretty damn floored when the doctor came in and asked if there were any other questions that I had, and when I responded that I needed to know the IP address of the DNS server that he left the room and came back with an iPhone on the network settings screen that answered my question.  (And why doesn't the Android network settings tell you that?  I should write a quick app for that...)

Anyway, I'll get back to more cancer news later tonite if I can.  Right now I'm kinda starved and hoping that Lorien arrives soon with some food.

5 comments:

rubin110 said...

Hit menu while viewing the list of SSIDs in Android.

jg said...

You'll find that IT Support for patients is just one of many things that are screwed up in hospitals.

I eventually just got a 4G hotspot (from work) so I didn't have to deal.

On the chemo, sounds like you might be getting a more tolerable dose if they only want you in for a week. My chemo treatments were 3 weeks inpatient and they weren't fun.

Kick it, Rich!

Catrina said...

LOL! Well, I'm glad to see you're the same old Rich! :) Glad you're home... -c

dingdingwikki said...

> Hit menu while viewing the list of SSIDs in Android.

[Yes, I realize your response was prompt and I'm now responding more
than a month later...]

[And likely nobody will ever see this, or if they do, won't care about
it, but I want to record this for completeness. And I will separately
email this to rubin, since he's likely the only one to care.]

That does get me to a screen that I didn't know exist, but I don't
think it answers the question. It looks like you can *set* DNS if you
use a static IP, but you can't query the existing DNS if you are using
DHCP.

This became relevant again b/c I'm tentatively switching my treatment
from a doctor's office in Oakland to the Alta Bates cancer center in
Berkeley, and it looks like they have the same annoying login
redirection that the Alta Bates hospital in Oakland did. So I was
determined to solve this problem.

If you're using wifi, at least, you can get this info on android via
android.net.DhcpInfo, via android.net.wifi.WifiManager.getDhcpInfo().
I was going to just whip up a quick app to do this, but then I decided
I should first see if a free one already existed.

I found Android Network Monitor:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/anetmon/

The binary download failed for me (a permissions problem), so I was
motivated to try downloading the source and building it myself to fix
it. But then that build just worked. But then I see that it didn't
actually have the info that I wanted. So I added it. I'm awaiting to
see if the author wants a patch.

So I got that all done, and was set to see if I could use the info
next time to see if I could get wifi working on my mac in Berkeley.

But in the meantime, I got curious about why the hell things weren't
working on my mac, when they work fine on the phone. I haven't yet
been back to the cancer center to test it out, but I think I now know
why.

See point (1) here for details:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2227251?start=0&tstart=0

[details excluded b/c blogger is limiting my comment to 4096 chars. dammit.]

And that was exactly my problem. At some point in the past for some
reason I had added the wonderful 8.8.8.8 to the DNS resolution list.
And at home I can indeed see that if I remove that, then the
DHCP-supplied 10.0.0.1 suddenly appears, where it had been previously
not present.

So I suspect that the next time I take my mac to the cancer center in
Berkeley it will just work. Hopefully I won't ever have to be
overnight in the hospital in Oakland to have to check there.

dingdingwikki said...

Ok, here are the damn details, in a separate comment:

--- begin ---
There have been two major changes in DNS resolution in Mac OS X Snow
Leopard as compared to Mac OS X Leopard and previous releases, and
this tip is intended to explain them.

1) User-specified DNS servers, if any, are now used to the exclusion of all others

DNS server addresses may be manually-specified by users via the
Networking preference pane by selecting the active interface
(e.g. AirPort, Ethernet, etc.), the clicking the "Advanced…" button in
the lower right hand corner of the window, and selecting the "DNS"
tab.

DNS server addresses may also be provided by a DHCP server.

In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, if any DNS servers are manually specified,
they will be the only DNS servers consulted; any DNS servers specified
via DHCP will be ignored

This differs from Mac OS X Leopard and previous releases of Mac OS X,
as in those releases, if DNS servers were specified manually as well
as provided via DHCP, the manually-specified server(s) would be
queried first, and if those requests failed, requests would then be
sent to any DNS server(s) specified via DHCP.

This means that in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, if queries to
manually-specified DNS servers fail, the request will be considered to
have failed and no DHCP-specified DNS server will ever be queried.

Users may encounter this because at some point a DNS server (which is
no longer functioning or reachable) was manually set in a work or
other environment and they had forgotten about it since the previous
behavior was for failed requests to "fall through" to DHCP-specified
servers.

Because of the change in behavior, those same systems will fail to
resolve any DNS requests in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
--- end ---