Work Archives - iWatson Blog

Week Activities

Fourth of July

The Fourth of July weekend was pretty uneventful with the whole COVID-19. We went and visited my old neighborhood, My boss lives there, and they throw a party called “Cul-de-Sac of Fire” where they have a HUGE BBQ, Bounce Houses, Food Trucks, and Fireworks. There was a bit of a change this year, and they had Fireworks, 1 Food Truck, and Sno-Cone Shack..

We were a little nervous about going, so we picked up some food and ate it in the car and showed up for the Fireworks. We were very nervous about being there, but didn’t talk to hardly anyone. *crossing fingers*

The show was amazing! They had about $5k worth of Fireworks and they went off for almost 45 minutes. It was amazing! (See featured image)

Broken Phone

It’s been a very boring week, except for my phone. I try and go into work once a week to water the plants and check on the servers. This week, we had to do a bid for a new software product we are trying to get, so a few of us were meeting there for that. The lease of our building is almost up and we have a huge space for 6 guys. We are in the process of trying to clean up and find a new place. The fridge is full of food, which half of it is probably left over from people who have quit.

I wanted to take a picture of the food in the fridge, so people could claim their food. If they don’t we are going to dump it. I started taking a picture of the freezer and dropped my phone! It was totally slow motion…..I watched it fall and probably said a couple foul words! After picking up the phone and inspecting it, it looked like I got lucky. Unfortunately, the screen wouldn’t turn on! This is the time I realize, “I am addicted to my phone”.. Wait. I internally admit to the fact that I am addicted to my phone. The whole drive home, I mentally noted how I would miss my phone and the things I provides me. #addiction

Customer Support

I purchased the extended warranty on my phone, which states that It will cover accidental damages. Perfect right? Well.. Of course they need to trouble shoot the phone, because they DO NOT want to pay for it. After spending 30 minutes on the phone with someone she sent me to the claims department, with a claim ID. I thought I was golden. On my way to ordering a fixed phone…. “How would you like to pay for the Deductible?”.. I was sooo annoyed. Not once did the lady ask me for a “Claim ID!” I questioned her and she said I’d have to pay for the deductible. We ended the call, and another chat conversation was started with Google to try and resolve this confusion.

Second try

I was able to contact Google again and clarify that, I did not break the screen and there are no physical damage to the phone. They finally gave me approval to take the phone to the certified repair place (UBreakIFix, which I HIGHLY recommend. They are amazing!) — I dropped the phone off on Wednesday night, and went back in on Thursday at lunch and picked up my fixed phone for $0! The phone works great, but I’m super paranoid about dropping it again.

TemperPi Project

The TemperPi project (“Little Break“) has been working great, but it is in some need of updates. I checked the temperature in the server room last weekend and my jaw hit the floor! The temperature was resting around 72, so I was a little alarmed. For some reason, I have neglected checking the temperature lately, because it usually hovers around 63 or so. We turn the heat up when we aren’t there and apparently the whole building shuts down over the weekend. Our little AC is pumping away over the weekend to keep that room chilly. The building we are in was recently sold. The new owners must be trying to cut costs.

Friday before everything shuts down for the weekend.

Saturday while everything is baking in the sun!

The office returning to normal operation.

Playing with technology.

The Problem

I wanted to talk about something I’ve been playing with at work (not for work..just at work). Before I start, I want to say that I’m not trying to do a full review or guide on how to set this up. It is just a little story about what was built.. 🙂

We have two entrances to our work. We have the main entrance and then a second door most of us use to go to the bathroom. No one is monitoring the main door, so if a package is delivered, it would sit there until someone happened to go to the bathroom or you go looking for it. If someone came to the office to meet with us, they never knew where to go. Most of the time the visitor would sit up there waiting for someone to greet them. A coworker mentioned that it would be nice to have a webcam to view people coming and going. This is how this little project was born.

The solution. Version 1

My nephew is always up on cool tech toys and had recently built a Raspberry PI garage monitor system. I took that idea and built one for the office. The following items were used:

A Raspberry Pi 3 – Raspberry Pi 3
Web Cam 1080p – I can’t remember what type this is
Raspbian – UI for Raspberry Pi
MotionEye – Software used to manage the camera and motion, etc.

Setup

I didn’t want to have a monitor plugged into the Pi all the time, even though I was using a GUI OS (Raspbian), so I setup all the stuff at home. MotionEye has a pretty good page that describes how to install the software, and that was pretty easy. The following script (very simple) was used to post a message to a Microsoft Teams server indicating what the IP Address of the Pi. This would allow me to make a change to the WiFi settings to connect to the WiFi when it booted up. Everything should have been taken care of after that, because I can use putty to connect to the machine.

import teams
import tools, os
import pymsteams

def teamMsg(ip):
    ips = ip.split(' ')

    myTeamsMessage = pymsteams.connectorcard("<secret>")
    myMessageSection = pymsteams.cardsection()
    # Section Title
    myMessageSection.title("Pi Boot")
    # Activity Elements
    myip = ips[0]
    myMessageSection.activityTitle("Here is my IP(s) - %s " % (ip))
    myMessageSection.text("Here is a link to come watch Watch. [Watch here](http://%s:8765) - username: 'user' -- blank password " % (myip))
    # Add your section to the connector card object before sending
    myTeamsMessage.addSection(myMessageSection)
    myTeamsMessage.summary("Camera booted.  Connected to network.")
    myTeamsMessage.send()


import teams
import tools, os

ipaddress = os.getenv("_IP")
print ipaddress
teams.teamMsg(ipaddress)

This code hasn’t been cleaned up.

Motion Detection

One feature of motionEye is to detect motion, so I created some scripts to post messages to Teams when motion was triggered. This was a great idea in theory, but it would never work. MotionEye wouldn’t fire these scripts for some reason, and I haven’t been able to fix it..yet

Plugging it in

I took the Pi to work and plugged it into the network and fired it up. It didn’t go so smooth, but I was able to work it out and get it going. We had fun with it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t doing what we wanted, since it wouldn’t run the scripts during a motion event. We had more fun watching the videos of coworkers going to the bathroom, coming to work, or going home.

Boredom

We eventually grew bored of this setup and thought it would be a better idea to monitor the parking lot. Specifically Nefarious Corner mentioned in The Parking Lot post. It was nice to view this area, because it was more interesting than watching the co-workers go to the bathroom. We found a few problems with this setup and the raspberry pi.

Problem 1

The Pi didn’t have enough processing power to handle the video processing. We were getting pretty low refresh rates, so the videos were very choppy and provided little value.

Problem 2

The machine would crash often, and the only thing we could figure out is that it may be overheating. I have the Pi in a Retro Nintendo case, which is super cool when you are building a gaming machine. The case comes with a fan, but it wasn’t installed…woops!

Problem 3

There wasn’t enough space on the memory card, so it would fill up fast and then freeze up. When this thing freezes up it was difficult to get in without having a monitor plugged in.

Version 2

After the incident mentioned in The Parking Lot and the camera crashing. I wanted to get MotionEye working on a new machine that can hopefully handle the image processing and have more space.

I located an old machine that we haven’t used since 2010 and repurposed it. The new machine was constructed using Ubuntu Server 19.10. It didn’t go as smooth as the Pi due to some mistakes on my part, but I got it running. Things are running and we haven’t seen much action on the camera though.

I’ve had fun setting this up, but I’m pretty sure it can do a lot more. I have several ideas on how to extend this. One would be to integrate this with the software/service by Sigthound, which is a service that can recognize cars, license plates, people, etc. Go check it out if you haven’t seen it before. I would suggest looking at the Cloud API. I’m going to apologize now, because after you go to the site, your FB wall will be riddled with ads from Sighthound. 🙂

Conclusion

I love exploring and playing with technology and this system is perfect for watching people, especially those misbehaving in your parking lot. I say bring on the summer and the crazy meth-heads.

Work is fun part 2.

The Quest Begins

I have a bit of an update on the Amazon fiasco I talked about in the “Work is Fun“.

We have been trying to get into that AWS Machine for sometime now. The client contacted Amazon, but they would only do so much unless you paid for a “Premium Plan“. He was on the Developer plan, but they wanted him to go to the Business or Enterprise. The Business price is pretty pricey and the Enterprise is even more! If you have some time, I would check it out. Looking at the Business plan, you can see how crazy your bill could get.

First Attempt

On Monday the Amazon support gave us a link to try, but I was too busy to try. The next day, Tuesday, I started attempting this fix.. Half way through the page, I came to the realization that this is exactly what I tried before and it wasn’t going to help much, but I was willing to give it a shot. I was sure they understood the problem and gave good advice.

I shut down the site and started copying the VM and doing as instructed. The whole process took about 2 hours to complete, due to a lot of paranoia and double checking. The client was contacted and he switch his account to the Business account and summoned someone from support to call me. Of course, when they called it said “SCAM LIKELY” so I was a little reluctant to answer.

Lets try and fix your problem

The person on the other end talked to me and was trying to understand our problem. He wanted me to try the process again, because the tech who send us that list must have known what he was talking about. The support guy even offered to READ it to me. Feeling a little annoyed, I said to him:

Me: “Sir, my goal here is to try and recover the admin password, right? Do you see anything in these instructions that will help me accomplish my goal?”

Support: “Oh.. You are right. Let me check something”

He later came back with nothing that could help. He did see that we were now on the Business plan, which allowed the case to be escalated to the people who have the technical skills to help. Come to find out, He explained that he was in accounting and he couldn’t help anymore than he already had. I had to wait for someone to call me.. .. Oh great.

Trying to sync up.

Tuesday night, We were getting the boy ready for bed and I looked down at my phone and noticed I was getting another call but it was from an “Unknown Number”, so I let it go to voicemail. The voicemail had some guy from amazon saying he was calling about our case. What the heck!? Why would they be calling me from an Unknown Number? That is ridiculous. I turned off all spam blocking on my phone and allowed all unknown numbers to come through. (read: ANNOYING)

The next day, Wednesday, I sat around waiting for another call. About 3 in the afternoon, I emailed the client asking if I should just be waiting for a call, or what was going to happen? He got on the site and summoned Amazon again and they called right away, from an “Scam Likely” number. Of course, I answered the phone. It was the same people in accounting. They looked over the case and said they would put in a note to have the tech call me during MY work hours (9am – 5pm), not theirs so we could hook up. They were informed that the number had to come from a legit number, or it wouldn’t get answered.

The call.

Thursday morning around 10:10am, I was sitting in a weekly call with a client going over some recent changes and I get a call and the caller Id read “2”. Just the number 2? That was pretty odd, but I had to answer the phone. The phone call was from Amazon and he wanted to work through the problem right then. The decision was made to do it right then and skip the other meeting, so we proceeded.

The guy wanted to send me a link so he could see my screen. I’ve heard this before, where they want to steal all your stuff after they take control, but this was Amazon calling and they wouldn’t do that right!? No, they wouldn’t, but the thought went through my mind.

I was sent a link through the AWS Console, attached to the case, and it was pretty safe and actually really cool! He could see my screen, but had no control. He had a pointer that would show up where he wanted me to click. It was quite cool. He guided me through each step to try.

Come to find out, I had found a video earlier that didn’t work, I had a few things set up from that video that helped us accomplish our goal. All we had to do was turn on some Management stuff and pull up a Powershell window and we were on the machine.

Changing the password

The first thing we tried was resetting the Administrator password, but that failed. It looks like the previous company had deleted the Administrator account, which I think is valid. It makes it harder for someone to break in.

The second thing we did was add a new user with Admin privileges. This was super easy and slick. After creating the account I was able to RDP into the machine without any problems!

The work begins

I was able to get in and the client was super excited when I reported back to him. The process of learning the system and making some important fixes begins now. It doesn’t help that I’m super swamped at work, but i’m going to do my best to try and make this client happy. It is a fun project that I’m excited to work on.

I’m super impressed with the amazon support. It may be expensive for support, but it seemed worth it. Especially since I wasn’t paying for it!

The Parking Lot

Back Story

We have the most interesting parking lot. I’ve tried to mark up the map, but it didn’t turn out the best, so bear with me! As you can see we have a big parking lot. We are located on the border of Orem City. If you go down the back hill you end up in Provo. There is a path that leads down the hill, where a ditch runs north to south. If you cross the ditch, you end up in the back of a house and onto a street in Provo. The path is frequently used by people that stop at the bus stop or …something. There is a pawn shop near by and various other places that some might frequent. We use to think it was just a shortcut that people used until we started noticing the same odd people hanging around.

The Fight

One day we noticed an individual, Jacob (I know his name, because one day I went out to question him), come up from the hill with a backpack on and he went out by the Bus Stop and took his shirt off, put deodorant on and put on another shirt. A nice mustang pulled up later and they chatted for a bit. Then the mustang left after giving him some groceries. It was an odd sequence of events, so we were curious what was down that hill. Jacob took his groceries back down the trail.

The Adventure

On April 8, 2019, we decided to go on an adventure for lunch. The spring rain made it hard to explore a ditch, so we had to pick a dry day. The trail down to the ditch was a little sketchy. The hill is steep and the dirt is compacted, but there is a chain link fence to hang on to. We crossed the ditch and were checking out the house (See “Meth House” on the Map). and some lady stuck her head out of the window and said “Can I help you”. We were a little shocked, so I just said “Yeah, where does this trail lead? “. She replied with “People take it to the Mall. You can go through our yard if you want”. It was interesting, but she was the one that we keep seeing on the trail and going to the “Bus Stop”.

Walking up the trail to the “Mall” seemed like the best way to go, and it required us to dodge twigs and puddles. There were several strange things we ran into, and a few are the reason why we call it the “Meth Trail”. We found some gloves, which we thought was very strange! Then we turned around and found a giant bottle of “Fernox Antifreeze Protector Alphi-11”, Bucket, and Broom. “What The!?!?!” It was an interesting find. We finished walking up the trail to find a big tunnel under the road, but decided not to follow it any longer. The tunnel was full of spider webs and bird nests. The mission had to be aborted, so we got out of the tunnel and took the road back to work. The whole trip was about 3 miles, so it turned out to be some good exercise! 🙂

Meth Route

We have put camera’s in our windows to try and watch the activity of these people and it has provided many hours of entertainment trying to figure out what is going on. The lady living in the house has pretty much stayed the same, but there are new guys walking back and forth with her. They tend to do shady stuff in the parking lot on the weekend. I know I’m convinced they are selling drugs and doing other stuff.

Nefarious Corner

We have the Meth Heads and over the summer we started noticing a guy that would pull into our parking lot and sit for hours in his car. Of course, we started getting curious and started watching him. We noticed that there was always a trail of water that would be flowing down the parking lot under his car. We would joke that he was using the bathroom on his tire, because he was sitting there so long. This guy has been coming round for about 6 months or so.

The Confrontation

On Tuesday, the guy was there from 9:30am until 5pm. We were watching him during a meeting. He gets out of his car and smokes and throws his empty pack of cigarettes on the ground. We tried to see if he was relieving himself out there and it looked like he was, but we couldn’t tell. We went to lunch and walked by the car and noticed a puddle, but was it snow? Who knows.

When we got back from lunch, we two down from his car. He was fast asleep in his car with his phone in his lap. Not the best place to take a nap. We were curious about his story!? Why is this guy sitting out here all day? Is he OK? What is going on?

I left work a little after 5pm. He had moved his car 2 spots away from mine and still in there. I was determined to knock on his window and find out if he was OK! As I approached, I noticed that his windows were a little foggy. Something you’d expect when someone was in their car for a long time. I didn’t think anything else. I did start my phone recording audio to see if I could catch anything interesting when we chatted.

When I reached the car, I noticed he was kicked back in his chair, hands on his crotch pleasuring himself!!!! I didn’t know what to do! I knocked on the car and told him we had noticed he was parked there all day and asked if he was ok. He said he was fine. Of course he was, but I had just interrupted him. I turned away and said “BTW. You shouldn’t do that here anymore”. He took off. I was super scared and you can tell in the recording. Here is the recording so you can hear the interaction.

The audio. Lots of dead air at the first due to walking to the car.

…

I don’t think we will be seeing this guy again in the near future. He probably thought he had the perfect spot and I had to go ruin it!

I’m looking forward to more adventures in the parking lot this summer. It’s been pretty slow lately, because it’s hard to get up and down the hill in mud and snow. When spring rolls around again, I bet it will pick up!

Weekly update.

Pixel bites the dust…

On October 5^th 2016, I ordered my Pixel 1 phone. It was announced on October 4^th. I was super excited! I’ve always been a fan of Google phones. I had the first G1 that I used forever! I’ve had a few Android phones before the Pixel. (HTC Sensation and Nexus 5). An iPhone was in there for a little while, which felt like I was cheating on Android. I even enjoyed it!

My Pixel 1 started experiencing screen issues a year ago. After calling support, they made me wipe my phone and it seemed to fix the issue until December when it returned. The screen would jump up (the bottom of the screen was jumping up and down). The screen would show snow and become unresponsive. Being a long-term user, I was way out of my warranty. The warranty was almost up the last time they had me wipe my device. Conveniently, it went out after doing all the trouble shooting.

Shopping

It is impossible for me to show up at a store and pick something out if I haven’t researched it a ton. It took almost a month of research and deciding what I wanted to do, before I could settle on a phone. I paid $750 for the Pixel 1 with all the bells and whistles. I was not going to do that again! The pixel 4 is out and the price tag on that was super high! It has horrible reviews!

The Pixel 3 has an epic camera and phone stats, but the price tag is still high! You can purchase refurbished on Amazon, but the reviews are kind of scary. The price is great, but who knows what you will get and what kind of warranty you get is questionable. I also had a hard time deciding if I wanted an XL or basic phone. The XL is big, but how hard is it to use with one hand? (This will be something I regret. My hands are stubby)

Insurance

Most companies offer a device protection plan. T-Mobile has one where you pay $10 a month. Best Buy has one where you pay anywhere from $8 – 10 a month. They cover a lot of stuff and there is a piece of mind there, but I don’t want to pay an extra $120 a year for 2 years of “Piece of Mind”. I want the protection though. The Google Store the phones for a good price and they only charge $89 for 2 years of protection after the MFG Warranty expires. That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. Google has been fast at replacing my phones in the past.

The Big Day!

On January 4^th, 2020, I ordered my Pixel 3A XL. The bigger screen was appealing to me and the consensus was 50/50 on how good it is. The order said it would take 5 days to get the phone! I was kind of sad, because I wanted the phone now! I checked my email everyday after it shipped. The phone ended up taking 4 days to get to me.

Anticlimactic.

The phone, case, and screen protector all came around the same time. Backing up the old device and installing the new phone was super easy! The phone is much faster and has some fancier specs than the Pixel 1, but the OS version is the same! Using the 3A is just like using the Pixel. Not much changed, so it wasn’t as exciting as when I switched from the Nexus 5 to the Pixel. I’m so glad that I purchased it though. The phone works, and the screen is snappy! I had the 128gb before, but this one only has 64gb. I’m hoping I can get use to it! 😊 This one is already 80% full and it’s giving me heartache! The first time I used the phone one handed, I found that my thumb had a hard time reaching the “back” button without dropping the phone! AAARGH!! So annoying, but I’m going to get use to it. The battery is the best part. It lasts 20h per charge with my normal use! I’m excited about the phone so far.

Work Update

Work has been busy this week. It was mostly boring until Saturday when I got a call from my boss saying the machines were “super loud” and the server room was HOT! The Air Conditioning stopped working. After shutting off the machines, He called the building maintenance and had them come look at it. When the maintenance guy showed up, he said his boss was up on the roof and noticed an AC was running (in the winter) and he shut it off! WHAT?

We have been in this building for 5+ years and the AC isn’t new! We were busy on Saturday night, out celebrating my Birthday, so Sunday was the only day I could go turn everything back on and get the Domain Controller, Firewall, etc all booted back up. IT work is not what I do on a day to day basis, but I understand a lot of the machines and software. The adventure took 2 hours to get everything working again. With Copious notes and trial and error, I have a better understanding of how things are put together in the server room. Everyone should be able to be up and running in the morning when they get to work.

Great times. More celebration needs to be had, because my birthday is January 13^th!

Work is fun.

It has been a crazy week at work and with life. I have been working on several projects at work. I currently have at least 4 projects that I am working on. Each one provides a unique learning experience. It’s always so fun (and stressful). For instance, this week I had to try and recover an admin password for an EC2 instance on Amazon. To make things worse we don’t have the public/private let pairs for the machine either.

I can’t go into too much detail, but a little background on this project might help. The client payed someone to develop a system. They parted ways and now something is broken. They are paying us to try and fix the system. I’ve had to play detective piece a bunch of stuff together. The thing that is broken resides on a machine that we need access to. This machine is hosting a website and has passwords I need, and I’m pretty sure this is where the problem is.

I am NOT a professional IT man, and I can hack my way through things. Acting with confidence when mucking around with machines on AWS isn’t my strong point. This is probably something I need to work on. Full Stack developer? Is IT included in that?

I did a lot of research and looking into how to change the password. I found a lot of options, but none with clearly marked prerequisites. They also use a bunch of terms, I have no idea what they are, so when they do list a prerequisite, I fail to catch it. Needless to say, I ended up finding them after I had gone down the rabbit hole.

One thing you may, or may not know about me is, I am a big worry wart. I worry about things going wrong that may not go wrong. If I don’t own the data, I get this super anxious feeling that everything is going to break or blow up. My heart rate always skyrockets. Hopefully I can post a graph from my Fitbit.

Not much in the way of cardio. Mostly stress.

A few attempts at getting the password was made earlier in the week, but nothing that required powering down the server. Thursday at 1pm was going to be the best time to make another attempt. The client had a few demo’s that he was doing. After about two hours of stress (cloning, moving IPs, installing software, etc), I get to the point a where I can run the software that allows me to change the password. EC2Rescue was suppose to be the rescue, but it failed miserably. There was a read/write permission issue. Nothing in the docs said anything about this. I don’t think I missed it… the stress level was elevated after this discovery.

Now it was freaking out out mode. I mounted the two drives from the machine I needed to get to, and luckily I could see files and I searched and found some of the things I needed

Time was running out, so I set the IP addresses back to the old machine and brought it back up. The client had a demo in the morning, so we tested the site/apps to make sure everything was working. A new plan had to be revised, because I didn’t want to waste any more time.

I was able to find some passwords on the drives mounted earlier. The passwords were useful to make the necessary changes to another system. Friday night the build started working. Excitement was in the air! Emailing the client the news brought me great joy! I have one more task to complete this week, but it requires a Mac, iPhone Emulator, and an Xcode expert. I will talk to that guy on Monday. We should be able to get everything working.

It’s been a crazy project, and I hope we get to work with this client more in the future. Coding is my first love, and solving complicated non-coding issues is second. I’ve learned a ton from this project!

Please forgive my random thoughts/posts.