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October 18

Updating: please do not turn off your computer

I didn't get an answer on the other web site. When Hurricane Michael was coming through, my computer went off three times. The first time, I had already been told my computer needed to be restarted for updates (Windows 10) and I told it to wait until I was through. When I turned it back on, it was updating. I do have a second question: why does it tell me it is 100 percent complete when it is taking a long time to do whatever it is doing? There should be a progress report with percentages going up. But Michael turned the computer off while the message "Please do not turn off your computer" was there. Is this a problem?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 14:34, 18 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Unless you were unlucky and windows was just updating the registry at a critical point, the system will remember where it was when the power failed and will continue the update when power is restored. If you think there was a problem, you can roll back the update (from the last good registry backup) and start again from the beginning. I don't understand Microsoft's percentages, either. Dbfirs 21:15, 18 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

[ec][Re: turning off the computer: This is usually OK; when an engineer writes update software he tries to spend a bunch of time setting something new up, checks to make sure the new is good, then either does a switch from old to new as fast as possible or tells the computer to use the new the next time it boots. However, it is impractical to test for a power outage after every tiny change, so don't turn your computer off on purpose, hope that it still boots if a power failure turns the computer off, and do a checkdisk and a fresh attempt at updating the system if it still boots.

Re: 100% complete: Laziness. You put up a percent counter for the part that takes a long time on your development system and ignore anything that takes a tiny fraction of a second. In the field that tiny fraction of a second sometimes tales far longer. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:18, 18 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't had any obvious problems. What is the best way to determine if everything is all right?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:50, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well, backup all data to another reliable external data storage and reinstall Windows which would solve software failures. All data is lost! and filesystem(s), registry and Files are renewed. Another question is for hardware damages. After using messy power supplies, I had more hard drive failures. This would be a permanent damage, caused by over and under voltage levels. I did not recognize this cause due hard drives were improper handled and stored by a retailer. But it simply may by caused by another configuration of the restored backup like file versions or obsolete or missing files, as well of used third party application software. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 06:56, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That would be a last resort to be used only if you experience serious problems. I would just run CHKDSK and continue as normal. You could roll back the update (click Start and then Settings; Click on Update & security; In the sidebar, choose Recovery) but this will only be necessary if something went seriously wrong with the update. Dbfirs 07:14, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Confirm, repair file system first. But, backup files to external media first to avoid losts. When not solved, the question will be, spending time for reengineering the failure or simply renew the software. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 08:22, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

October 19

Repeated Error 522

For several days already I've been constantly getting Error 522 while trying to access Pirate Bay (all other websites load normally). This and this confirm the site is up and live. Any ideas on what to do? Brandmeister^talk 13:21, 19 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those sites are lying to you. I get Error 522 as well. Most of the proxies at https://piratebay-proxylist.com/ are working.

In my experience, The Pirate Bay is the fastest way to download Slackware. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:35, 19 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Strange. Thanks for the proxies anyway. Brandmeister^talk 16:35, 19 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

thepiratebay.org is working fine for me as of about 1 minute ago. Nil Einne (talk) 02:35, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

[1] suggests quite a lot of US ISPs are blocking it, although it's not clear if you would see a 522. One person did mention 522 except the circumstances are unclear. [2] mentions at least one other person who seems to confirm 522 via a US ISP. Admittedly it's not entirely clear that US ISPs are the source of problems. No one seems to have identified a court order or statement from ISPs anything. Although I suspect US ISPs are not dissimilar to ISPs elsewhere any may be willing to cooperate with governments on this sort of thing for the right incentives. It could of course be whoever is behind Pirate Bay is blocking connections from US IPs for some reason or have misconfigured something for the servers serving those from the US [3]. You can probably find more by reading the reddit discussions and elsewhere, I admit I'm not really that interested. In any case having seen all this I have strong doubts that the sites above are "lying". I suspect Pirate Bay has been up all that time. I would note sites like 'downforeveryoneorjustme.com' tend to be fairly automated. I'm fairly sure decent ones should detect a 522 as a failure, but I wouldn't be completely surprised if even they fail with some poorly implemented servers i.e. sometimes they may be wrong, but not really lying simply confused. Nil Einne (talk) 02:52, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for being unclear. I was using a colloquial expression common among engineers: "Your oscilloscope is lying to you (it says that there is no pulse but the 20Mhz bandwidth cannot 'see' a pulse that narrow)." "Your voltmeter is lying to you (the AC signal you are looking at has a crest factor it cannot handle)." "Your compiler is lying to you (the compiler says the error is in line 1024 but it is actually several lines above it)." "The automated 'is X down' website that says 'it's just you' is lying to you. (It has no knowledge of what other users can reach and should say 'it is up for me')." Sorry for the confusion. --Guy Macon (talk) 07:14, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the 'downforeveryoneorjustme.com' message is a bit misleading, although my impression is some such sites use more than one location to test the connection.

But the case for 'pirates-forum.org' is a bit more complicated. It specifically says

This page shows whether the site has been reachable and whether someone somewhere has been able to register, upload torrents, or post comments.

It's doubtful that's wrong, since I am able to reach it just now, in between and now. And suspect I could have the previous few days as well.

It also says

If our sites have been available but you've been unable to reach them that is outside of our control. Some part of the Internet may have broken or someone may have deliberately blocked you. Give it a day or two then try a proxy or VPN.

This part is a little misleading. For starters, if the Pirate Bay was very proactive in only allowing content which was released with the copyright holders permission, it's likely that many of the blocks would be removed eventually. Also, in some cases, it's likely the admins will have screwed up and are at fault for whatever is the problem. Possibly including this case. So they do always have some control, and in some cases have some control even without having to fundamentally changing the site.

If our sites are down we'll already know and be working on getting them back up. We don't issue estimates so don't ask how long it will take.

This last one is also a little misleading. It's quite likely there will in some cases be a time frame where they don't know or aren't working to get them back up. It would be more accurate to say something like "We'll find out very soon, and start working to get it back up as soon as we can. There's no point bugging us."

Yet while these parts could be said to be misleading, I'm not convinced that they're particularly relevant to the OP since they mostly seem interested in the 'is it working for someone' (which is the first thing that says) for which the answer seems to be yes. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they're more interested in the 'is it working' not quite understanding that it working doesn't necessarily mean it's working for everyone for a multitude of reasons, some of which could be TPB's fault. They may have understood better if that site was more accurate, but I'm not totally convinced as people tend to ignore that later stuff.

Nil Einne (talk) 08:09, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

One minor quibble: Re: "if the Pirate Bay was very proactive in only allowing content which was released with the copyright holders permission", the Pirate Bay has never hosted any copyrighted content. What the copyright lobby objects to is the Pirate Bay telling you where to find copies of copyrighted content. In the case of Slackware Linux (which is legal to download) the Pirate Bay tells you that you can find a copy on my PC. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:56, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I had a quick look and found [4] which suggests it may be also parts of Europe. A complicating factor is that a lot of this 'not working in X location' is not actually reports from people with ordinary internet access in said locations. Instead mostly based on VPNs, proxies etc. And by VPNs, proxies, I mean commercial or free services (or hacked/accidental public) not someone sharing their home connection with a mate. Anyway such connections may have their own set of issues (including of course being targets for blocks), and from my limited experience the way they configure their services in various places can be weird too.

Interesting that suggests the 522 error mentioned above is coming from CloudFlare. A quick traceroute confirms TPB is coming via CloudFlare for me too. I had a look for more decent write ups and found [5] which seems to confirm it's completely fine for some people, others not so much.

Given their history and outlook, I'm somewhat doubtful CloudFlare would intentionally block Pirate Bay without a court order or at least telling everyone they've decided to do so and with a clearer block message. I wonder if this could be a routing problem or TPB for whatever reason has blocked some of the US and other CloudFlare CDNs. While the earlier link is from September, I didn't see any more recent statement or whatever from tech admins e.g. in reddit when I had a closer look and would have expected someone to be semi spamming it to all those threads if there was one.

I'm also not sure that this is affecting all of the US even if that seems to be the most commonly complained location. To my eye, there's just too little talk for that. (Yes there's a lot, but not the amount I would suspect if no one in the US has been able to access it for ~2 months without either using Tor or one of the proxies.)

Suffice it to say, as I mentioned above, I suspect the first statement made in the pirate-forums.org is probably mostly true. It's been up for someone in most of those periods marked with a green dot.

Nil Einne (talk) 08:31, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Another possibility is some sort of Denial of Service attack on TPB. They get those all of the time, and different DOS attacks target different aspects of the system that connect us to a website. --Guy Macon (talk) 09:00, 20 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Per this the site is now down for everyone, although news search shows nothing yet. Brandmeister^talk 17:30, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

October 25

refused to connect

A couple of web sites have given the message "refused to connect" when I attempted to access them. Why would this happen? Is there anything I can do about it? --Halcatalyst (talk) 15:08, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]