Computer/phone advice/troubleshooting help thread

This sounds as if the OS doesn’t manage to wake up the computer, i. e. software issues, most likely some driver. Did you update drivers recently, or Windows itself? If yes, with a bit of luck it will work again with the next update.

Or did you install new hardware, like a new graphics card? Then it might be harder to find a solution.


Note that by flipping the power switch, you do a hard reset, i.e. you brutally cut off the power. As the computer was in sleep state before, this shouldn’t lead to any problems with the file system as could happen if you do the same during normal operation. But if you had any software open before sending the computer to sleep where you hadn’t saved your work, that work might be lost. I’d recommend to power down your computer after work instead of sending it to sleep for the time being.

 

I shut the computer down for the first time in months after your suggestion, and it led to the same issue. I have to flip the power supply switch on and off for a while before something finally triggers and the computer boots.

I updated the motherboard bios for kicks and no change.

Sure feels like hardware to me. I don't know if the power supply is going bad or if something on the motherboard isn't responding to the power supplies signals.

 

When the computer is off, the power button is controlled by the BIOS. Not sure why it is causing a full main power switch cycle to fix this. It could be that Windows is not shutting completely down or the BIOS never gets the message that the OS has shut down.

Run an sfc scan. (Run Command prompt as Admin, then type "sfc /scannow". And just wait. Hopefully it will fix some errors. Very rarely does it find errors it cannot fix. Then reboot.)

 

Just as a sanity check cuz it's been a few years since I'd done this, but does the following layout make sense?

ISP-Provided Modem/Router Combo linked via Ethernet to:

• a mesh network (being used more as an extender for mobile devices)
• a PC
• another PC
• a third-party router a few dozen meters away that'll have a bunch of Macs plugged in

Or does it make more sense to just have the ISP combo unit bridging into a third-party router with more Ethernet ports and run everything from there?

 

I need some advice about my hosting company. www.greengeeks.com



They are currently giving me a lot of trouble and issues and blaming my end for it, but I'm guessing it is an issue on their end that they just refuse to dig deep enough to find.

My hoisting company is GreenGeeks. they're awesome because they offset their carbon footprint by 3x, so they put 3x back into the grid than they use. They're the "greenest" hosting company by far, and by all appearances use all cutting edge tech, fast, good plans, etc.

Problem:
About a year ago they started occasionally blocking my IP address, and only mine, so I could not access my own websites. And they would also block one of my domain email addresses. Which I won't post because I don't want spam bots to find it. But you can find it at

https://www.whitneydafoe.com/contact

When I contacted them, they unblocked it, and told me it was due to continued, as in over and over again sometimes every few seconds attempts to login to this email address using the wrong credentials. Meaning the wrong password or server name or something. They repeatedly just tell me that I am using the wrong credentials on one one of my devices. Hard to blame them, they probably deal with a lot of grandmas who don't. have their computer plugged in (I'm not that far from that )

But I am not stupid about stuff like this, I copy pasted all the credentials for IMAP email addresses into a 1Password document with all my passwords, and copy pasted them from their into Spark to setup the email addresses. So everything is always copy pasted. Including the passwords, which I create myself and are crazy long alpha-numeric-speical characters and very secure.

There's no extra spam coming through to my email address, or emails not from me being sent, so no one has hacked in. Regardless, I decided to reset all my domain email passwords in case. And then none of them were able to be added back into Spark. I got this message for all of them despite all the credentials being right, and confirmed by GreenGeeks.



So I put all the passwords back to what they were before, and then I was able to add them back to Spark. Very strange. But I just left it that way because no one had hacked in and it was working and secure.

Recently about a month ago they have started blocking my IP every day to every almost. And I have to leave them a message to unblock my IP and cannot send or receive any emails from the above email address or access my website until they unblock it.

I tried as an experiment to remove the email address in question from Spark and change the password in my cPanel in GreenGeeks, and re-add the email address. but it would not load, giving me "cannot connect to the server" error message the same as it did before.

So I did some googling and downloaded every viable email app for iOS and macOS and tried them all and they were all either buggy (AirMail is literally awesome and full of amazing features, but it's basically a beta app right now and has too many bugs to really be useable for me), (Edison mail is great in many ways but there are too many problems like not allowing keyboard text replacements to be used in the desktop app which Ii use all the time for my websites and email addresses and anything I write a lot, among other issues like not being able to attach images as attachments in the iOS app, you can only add them as inline images which is a problem sometimes) stuff like this.

And my IP address was still getting blocked with Spark quit on all my devices and [email protected] removed. So Spark was not the issue.

So I recently remembered what happened before with my password, set it back to the original one, and was able to add it back into Spark.

so something more complicated is happening here. I am guessing there is a security breach or something at GreenGeeks that they are not finding or unwilling to admit to or something like this. But I can't keep doing this, getting blocked every 3 days and waiting for them to unblock my IP.

this is what they wrote me about the issue with logs from their servers. (I hope this is safe to post publicly)

Your IP address was blocked due to failed IMAP login attempts

### Mar 25 11:56:45 chi100 lfd[22561]: (imapd) Failed IMAP login from 98.42.0.208: 30 in the last 300 secs - *Blocked in csf* for 300 secs [LF_IMAPD] Mar 25 12:02:53 chi100 lfd[38178]: (imapd) Failed IMAP login from 98.42.0.208: 30 in the last 300 secs - *Blocked in csf* for 300 secs [LF_IMAPD] Mar 25 12:09:05 chi100 lfd[15466]: (imapd) Failed IMAP login from 98.42.0.208: 31 in the last 300 secs - *Blocked in csf* for 300 secs [LF_IMAPD] Mar 25 12:02:22 chi100 dovecot: imap-login: Disconnected: Aborted login by logging out (auth failed, 2 attempts in 4 secs): user=, method=PLAIN, rip=98.42.0.208, lip=184.154.26.130, TLS, session=<3wzweLz3++BiKgDQ> Mar 25 12:02:26 chi100 dovecot: imap-login: Disconnected: Aborted login by logging out (auth failed, 2 attempts in 4 secs): user=, method=PLAIN, rip=98.42.0.208, lip=184.154.26.130, TLS, session=<9J8yebz3/OBiKgDQ> Mar 25 12:02:30 chi100 dovecot: imap-login: Disconnected: Aborted login by logging out (auth failed, 2 attempts in 4 secs): user=, method=PLAIN, rip=98.42.0.208, lip=184.154.26.130, TLS, session= ###​

So I'm hoping someone here who knows about this stuff can make a recommendation. Is this a problem with GreenGeeks and I need to switch hosting companies? That's where I'm at right now.

If so, do you have any recommendations for an alternative green hosting company? I saw an independent review of "green" hosting companies and HostGator was highly recommended and they have 1x offset, which is not as good as GreenGeeks but ok with me if I don't have to deal with this anymore. However, when I contacted them about switching, they knew nothing about their carbon footprint or green offset. And they never emailed me back about it.

Switching hosting companies would be a hassle, but if this seems like a GreenGeeks issue, HostGator said they could jus clone my cPAnel and move it over seamlessly.

Any advice would be great! Sorry for the long question.

 

Rate limiting login attempts is good security practice, but really it should only be blocking the offending IP address. 98.42.0.208 is a Comcast address. Obviously the first thing is to make sure that is not you.

 

I've checked with them about the IP address and apparently it is my IP that is causing the issue. But I don't know how. And I've tried everything I can think of to figure out how it could be actually happening on my end.

 

If you are using a home or SOHO router, which pretty much everyone does, then that is probably your external IP assigned by your ISP, and any PCs, phones, or IoT devices behind your router will all appear as coming from that address. We have had a similar issue at my former employer, where password changes were forced every 3 months. People would change their Active Directory password on thier PC, but forget on their phone, which would keep trying the old password and eventually lock them out of everything. The easiest way to narrow it down should be to just remove devices one by one till the problem goes away - leave the PC or laptop powered off for a day. Turn off the wifi on the phone(s) for a day, etc. Probably there is something running in the background on one of them that is still configured with an old password.

 

Yeah, I've already done this. I only have 2 devices with access to my email accounts and I removed my offending email from both in Spark and then added them back carefully on my laptop and phone using Airmail and Edison Mail. So unless every email app out there is buggy and trying to login incorrectly, this couldn't' be the problem.

Also, even Apple Mail would not load my email address after I changed the password. I don't think it is an app issue or an issue with any device.

 

Have you uninstalled all the other email client applications except for the ones you are actively using? IMAP clients may still try to sync in the background, even if you never actually use them to check your mail. I don't think you can uninstall Apple Mail, but if you are not using it make sure it does not have any addresses configured.

Also, keep non computing devices in mind as well. My NAS, my home alarm system, and my video cameras can all be configured to use email for various tasks (typically sending alerts), and passwords need to be kept up to date on all of them as well.

 

Alternatively, if you have to do so for operational reasons, and if you are sure that is your IP address (check your router's admin page, or just Google "what is my IP"), you can probably whitelist it in cPanel so that single one never gets blocked. Obviously it would be better to fix the problem properly, and how useful this idea is depends how often Comcast changes your IP. My own cable ISP rarely changes my IP address unless my hardware MAC changes, it has been the same for years.

 

@rhythmdevils The logs show that something is constantly trying to log in to your email account from your IP address using the wrong password. As far as I can see, this is a fact, and it’s not a problem at the hoster, but on one of your devices.

The two possibilities that come to my mind are:

1. As @Kernel Kurtz already said, some forgotten device or app where you configured your email maybe years ago with a password that was correct then, but isn’t anymore.
   
2. A virus on one of your devices (more probably a computer than a smartphone or tablet) that was able to find out your email address and server by looking at the configs of your email software, but not your password, and is now trying to brute-force its way to your account by trying one password after the other. (Why would they be interested in your emails? Probably not at all, they’d use your email address to send out phishing emails and spam.)

I think that number 1 is more probable, especially because I’d expect login attempts at SMTP (outgoing email server) instead of IMAP (incoming) by a spammer, but who knows.

As @Kernel Kurtz said, it would be good not to change the apps you already know of, but to completely switch off one of your devices per day, including stuff like your printer or your Roon server or your cooking device, anything that is connected to your network, until the problems stop. Then you know which device is the culprit, and you can look there what the problem might be.

P.S.: My guess why the new password didn’t work in Spark is that it contained a special character that Spark or the email server had problems with.

 

Make sure to check any/all smart home devices/hubs (thermostats, smoke detectors, lighting, refrigerators, ovens, water filter, answering machine, etc, etc, etc, etc). Almost every one of them can send out alerts of some sort. Nice devices use their own email system and only send to your address, but I also have some (mostly older) that wanted access to my mail server login.

 

Is there a way to simply open an app from the Lock Screen widgets in iOS16? Seems like an obvious thing to want to do, but googling didn't bring up much except for using the "Launcher" app which I downloaded and upgraded for $10 and it does open apps from the Lock Screen, but it also opens the launcher app every time which I have to then close, so it ultimately is not faster than just opening the phone and launching the app manually.

Seems like there must be a way to do this. Apparently you can do it with shortcuts, but then the shortcut app is left open and has to be quit so same problem there. And there seems to be no way to script "quit shortcut app" into a shortcut.

Sometimes Apple seems to miss things that seem very obvious to me like this.

 

Windows Explorer (WE) fuckery- My main speaker computer is running win 10 pro 2nd half 21 version and is now showing file type as media center file for all FLAC, WAV, and MP3 files that are in any album folder I explore. Aiff files show as AIFF Sound.

The problem is when I want to drag a folder of files to JRiver to play I have no idea (forget mp3 I never play them) what format I am using until I drop it into a playlist. No I don't use the Jriver DB, everything is file based for me.

I have tried properties in WE changing to general or docs and still get this odd file type. My other machine does not do this perhaps because it is on a less frequent update schedule. There, using WE everything is fine, wav, flac, etc.

Can anyone shed some light on how I can fix this?

 

Persistence: It seems there may be a version change on WE where type no longer means file type as in extension. I ticked a box called file extension and applied to all folders. Now seeing what type of file it is.

Funny though the other computer has this box as well. Not sure what is going on. But this workaround is fine.

 

I may be getting a M2 Macbook Air soon. Are there any impressions about the headphone jack for iem usage? Or just plan on external dongle? (Its not like it really matters; just looking for trustworthy impressions.)