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Changing passwords? lets make it as difficult as we can…

In this day and age of computer hacks and security problems, why do companies make it awkward to change usernames and or passwords? One example of an awkward procedure to change a password is on the VMware vCenter server. If like any good security minded person you have all  your passwords set to expire every 28 days or so, to change the password on the vCenter server you have to do some “command line fu” to change it. Heaven forbid that you have to change the username as well. So how do you do it? Well if you are running vCenter on a Windows 2008 server and connecting to a Oracle server (that actually holds all the data) there are a couple of things you need to do:

  1. Shutdown the vCenter server (disable it in the Services Control panel)
  2. Change the password for your vCenter user in the oracle DB
  3. Now here it the BIG gotcha. On the windows side you have to run a CMD prompt as an admin user. Just clicking on it in the start menu won’t do it. You have to right click on it and do “Run as Administrator”. If you fail to do this, the next step will fail and just piss you off even more. (The reason for this is the username and password are stored in the registry and I guess running cmd as normal user revokes all privs to modify the registry.)
  4. Now go to the location where VMware vCenter is installed and run the vpxd command with either a -p or a -P. If you use the lower case -p it will prompt you for the new database user password. If you use the -P option, right after the P you can put the new password on the command line.
  5. Now you should be able to start back up the vCenter processes.

Now if you need to change the userid, you need to use Regedit and go to :

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware VirtualCenter\DB (under My Computer)
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\VMware, Inc.\VMware VirtualCenter\DB for 64 bit versions of Windows.

and change #2 to be the new userid.

This is documented in the VMware KB Article : Changing the vCenter database userid and password. But if you don’t pay attention go the run as part, you will spend a lot of time trying to figure it out even if you are logged in as an administrator.

 

If your password expires in Oracle while vCenter is up and running, it appears to continue to work while it is up. But if you reboot the vCenter server or restart the vCenter processes, it will “hang” and never start. They also need to make their error messages a little more detailed as to why it is ‘failing’ to start.

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oh comcast, why you do the things you do?

It has been a little over a month (almost 2) since I last had a fit about comcast. Well new month, new bill, new bitch. I had previously gotten rid of the Comcast HD/DVR box as it well plain sucked and I was paying for something that did not work, and didn’t do any thing that they advertise on any of their commercials or web pages. So I replaced it with a TiVo, which caused my monthly bill to drop significantly. Well on the last bill I received, they attached 4 pages of price increases.  So what all did they change ?

Cable cards are 210% of the cost they are now, new cost is $6.30 a month, where they were $3 a month.

Digital Standard Def Cable Boxes are now 132% of the cost they are now. New cost is $9.25 a month, where they were $6.99 a month. What is weird is they are now the same price as an HD converter box.

Digital Starter package, only rose in price by $0.42… Not “too” bad.

Total Premium (rest of the digital channels and all premiums, [HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/Starz]) rose by $2. Not to bad either.

Internet (just the basic one) rose by $3.

 

What is getting me though is the hardware cost. I have had 2 standard def Cable boxes for over 10 years. They still function exactly the same as the day I got them, in fact the remotes still say “Adelphia” on them. You can’t tell me that it costs more to maintain a piece of equipment that I have had in my possession for 10+ years. If I calculate the price at current rates, 10 years at $6.99 a month for 12 months equates to $1,677.60 I have paid for 2 standard def boxes.. Surely those have more than paid for themselves in the 10 years I have had them. So why should I have to keep paying for a box that is “effectively end of life?”

What really pissed me off is the raise in the cable card rate.. The ONLY thing they do is an authorization piece, why are they now twice as expensive as they were before? They can’t do anything new?

 

So end the end, all the money I saved by getting rid of their box, is now being paid back again because the total of the price increase equals what I was saving.

 

Here is a hint comcast. Make the equipment free, or put all the channels back in ClearQAM. Nothing like a bait and switch with your “world of more” campaign.

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Yet another comcast visit

Well hopefully this will be the last post for a while about the problems with comcast… (Will see after next week when they post my new bill)… As I mentioned last time, getting a cable card installed seems to require an act of god when it involves comcast. The new contractor came out 2 saturday’s ago with a 3 more cable cards. (side bar/ I don’t know what it is about cable people, by why the hell do they always smell like they smoked a carton of cigs before coming in to the house? I have used an entire can of febreze in my living room after this tech and the two previous ones left.)

Anyways back to the story, the tech showed up, and and proceeded to put the cable card in the TiVO. It starts to do the firmware upgrade like the ones the other guys brought.. After it was done, he talked to the Comcast phone guy and then we found out that once again this card “was not in the system.” Is comcast / tri-wire’s inventory system so f&()’d up that they are not doing proper inventory of their equipment, but yet they can charge me out the ass for it?

So we pulled that card out and went through the others he had. The next one the phone guy said “should work”. Well put it in and then let it update the firmware. The guy on the other side pushed the right signals and my second TiVO is finally activated. So the tech got up and left, (and I had to completely soak the couch with febreze as it smelled so bad).

So now what can I bitch about with Comcast? The fact that they have had the ESPN’s screwed up for weeks now. The audio is so out of sync that you can’t watch anything that has close ups of people talking.

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Comcast TV Funhouse

Since we last met, here is what is happening in the world of Comcast…

  1. They have started the compression of HD channels even more.. Now instead of having 2 HD’s per 6MHz, they are bunching 4 HD’s in the same 6MHz. Which makes watching anything with fast motion on it look horrible.
  2. The problem with the cable card flashing, has appeared to be fixed. Funny that the Corporate Escalation people don’t know it is fixed yet, or maybe the magic gremlin just hopped in the TiVo and did it.
  3. I decided to get rid of the Comcast SA 8300 HD/DVR box. The reason behind this one is that about 3 weeks or so ago, Comcast decided to move all of the HD channels from the 700’s to the 800’s (to be “grouped together better”, yeah what ever.) Well when this happened, my TiVo and ReplayTV DVR’s auto updated the scheduled recordings with the new channels numbers. However the crappy SA8300 box didn’t. So to my surprise when I got home and found it hadn’t recorded anything in a week or so I was pissed. See when you pay over $2600 a year to COMCAST for a service you should expect it to work as they say it should. So I decided to quit paying them the $15.95 a month for the DVR service and just switch to the TiVo. Well today was the day for the tech to come out and do the box/cable card swap. As usual Comcast has the wrong address on my account so the tech called me because they wanted to come early, well they were 3 miles away from my house on the other side of town. So after we got that straighten out they showed up. It was a contractor and a new employee he was training.

    So in goes the first cable card, and it comes up needing a firmware upgrade. So we let it go, it kept flashing saying it was going to take an hour, but ended up only taking about 20 minutes. After the update, he called the Comcast number, where we hear that the card that we just spent 20+ minutes updating, is “not in their inventory” and therefore can’t be used. F’ing great. So luckly they had brought 3 cards with them. That is where the luck ended, as the other 2 cards “were not in inventory” either. So basically some one dropped the ball at the warehouse and was watching tv when they should have been doing work. So they left saying that they were going to try to find some more cable cards so they could come back.

  4. After they left, I bitched and it got escalated to Corporate again. Well the tech called back around 4 and said that since I called corporate that there was nothing he could do. I told him it wasn’t his fault that some one else screwed up, and I can’t tell if his phone died, or he just hung up.. Anyways, Comcast Corporate called me about an hour after that and wanted to talk. So I talked to her and they said they were going to try to get some one out on Tuesday. I told them that I had already scheduled it for Saturday as I wasn’t going to waste my time again and take off work to sit around while they play “lets try this one”.
  5. So as it sits now my adventure with TiVo has in total been 6 techs since June, and 9 cable cards… Out of the 9 cable cards, only 2 of them have ever worked.
  6. Hopefully after all of this is done, I will save over $200 a year on my Comcast bill. Or I may save more if I just drop them and go with Dish network.
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Comcast appointment #whoknows

I had another Comcast tech appointment today. See last weekend TiVo called me to work on the problem with the Comcast Cable card and the “flashing” that was occurring on about 25 channels. I talked with them for a while and then they conferenced in Comcast Phone support. The first thing out of Comcast’s “mouth” was “We need to have a tech come out and look at the lines in your house”. I was pissed, I spent the weekend before that with one of their tech’s who basically did absolutely nothing besides changes the ends in the house and replace the cable card. Neither of which fixed the “flashing” problems. So the phone guy, said he couldn’t do anything until a tech came out and did a in detail inspection of the lines. Haha what a freaking joke. So I had them schedule the appointment for 10AM today, preparing to waste the whole day on waiting for them to show up.

Like normal, 10AM came and past, around 11:15AM I get a call from a Comcast 866 number. It was one of their people calling to say that they ran out of cable cards in the area, and the warehouse was closed, and if I wanted it replaced I would have to schedule it during the week when the warehouse was open. I told them that I couldn’t and replacing it wasn’t going to fix the problem. I then explained what was going on and that the only real reason the tech was supposed to come out was to meter the equipment. She then said “Well the tech is running behind and won’t be there till after 12PM, is some one going to be there then?” I said I would and she hung up.

About 12:30 or so the Comcast guy showed up. Basically said “I know there is a problem with the cable card’s and I can’t fix it.” We then talked for a while about what the problem was and he said that there has been people calling in reporting it, but not one really took it seriously until Milan Puskar called in. It seems he had 15 TiVo’s at his place and ALL of them were doing the exact same thing as everyone else who had been calling in. That is when they finally started looking in to it. Go figure it takes a millionaire to get Comcast off of their ass to start looking in to the problem. The tech said that it is happening all over Morgantown and Fairmont from what he can tell, and every one is having the problems on the same channels.

He basically said there was nothing he could do except for pass it up to the supervisor for handling.

Here is a video I made of what it is doing. It is called “Flashing” by some of the Comcast phone people. I call it “Cable not working”. The funny thing when the tech left, was he said he hated working on cable cards because they don’t work. I was like hmm then make the channels unencrypted and you wouldn’t have this problem.

Since Comcast has not publicly admitted to what the problem is any place that I can find, here is something that I got from some one at comcast:

Only encrypted programs would be affected.  More specifically, only programs associated with segments that are part of more than twelve packages would be affected.  This is because the ECMs required to carry the entitlement IDs for up to twelve packages will fit into a single MPEG packet.  If more than twelve entitlement IDs are required, however, two MPEG packets are needed to fully encapsulate the ECMs. Not all two-packet ECM programs are affected by this problem.

The customer impact is further narrowed by the fact that only devices that specifically check the payload flag of the adaptation_control for ECM packets will be affected.  At present, and based on customer reports, this seems to be only TiVo devices.

Basically, there is an issue with decryption.  This will cause tiling, missing channels and not authorized errors.