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© Rakhesh Sasidharan

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macOS proxy settings

Posted: July 16th, 2019 | Category: Mac | §

One of the things since moving to macOS is that I am a total n00b when it comes to basic networking. Yes, I have some clue thanks to my (quite dated) Linux background, but there are a lot of macOS newness too that I am unaware of. I encountered one of these today.

I was trying out the Proxyman app because I wanted to do some HTTP debugging on my Mac. I installed it, then noticed that each time I stop or quit the app it breaks my Internet. I disabled the proxy settings via the macOS network UI, and even went so far as to uninstall the proxy helper installed by Proxyman – but nothing helped. If Proxyman was running Internet worked, else not.

Then I noticed that this problem seemed to be only when I am connected to VPN (which I am on for work). Apparently that has its own separate settings. Googling on that I came across the networksetup command.

On macOS you can run a command like networksetup -listallnetworkservices to list all the network services the macOS knows of. This also lists the VPN connections. You can then look at the proxy settings of a VPN connection via commands like networksetup -getwebproxy "<vpn-name>" and networksetup -getsecurewebproxy "<vpn-name>". (The former gives the HTTP proxy settings, the latter gives HTTPS). In my case these commands showed that I still had the Proxyman proxy set for the VPN connection.

I can either disable the proxy for the VPN, or I can disable and also remove the settings. I chose to do the latter (for both HTTP and HTTPS). I also wanted to do this for all my VPN connections (I had a few, for the various regions we have offices in) so rather than do it manually I decided to loop it thus:

This finds all my connections with the word “vpn” in them, then for each it removes the HTTP proxy settings and disables the proxy and then removes the HTTPS proxy settings and disables it. Simple stuff.

Thoughts on the Magic Mouse 2

Posted: July 13th, 2019 | Tags: | Category: Gadgets | §

Background: I purchased the Magic Mouse 2 today. I had been vary of purchasing it initially because I saw it with a colleagues and also the Apple Store and was concerned the flat nature of the mouse might not be very ergonomic. It probably still isn’t, but the past few months I had been using a Surface Mobile mouse (review from Windows Central here) and if my hand could get used to its flat nature I figured the Magic Mouse 2 might not be too bad. Plus with the Magic Mouse 2 I’ll get all the gestures so it’s way more useful too.

Very brief thoughts, after a few hours of use:

  • I like it so far. A nice minimal design. I thought the lack of buttons might be a problem (especially, I had read somewhere that the right click is a regular click on the right side and some people found that odd) – but not for me.
  • The mouse is heavy. Which is good. This was unexpected.
  • The two finger gestures are a tad difficult because the mouse itself moves when you do these, so you have to kind of hold the mouse and do the two finger gesture. Just a matter of practice I guess. Something like these MagicGrips might help there but I am not keen on sticking stuff to the mouse.
  • Yeah, it is funny that you have to charge the mouse by sticking a cable to the bottom. Very weird that the mouse lies on its side while you charge. Ugly. :)
  • The entirety of the mouse body is a touch surface, which is cool. You can swipe or click anywhere.

Login loop on wp-admin page

Posted: July 13th, 2019 | Category: WordPress | §

Noticed that MarsEdit was giving errors when trying to login to my WordPress blog. Similarly the wp-admin page would go into a login loop. This didn’t always happen. It looked like some public IPs of my ISP were being blocked. (I’ve seen similar behavior with Teams audio too. On some of my public IPs audio doesn’t work; disconnect & reconnect my WAN connection to get a new IP and if that’s from a different subnet it usually works).

This could be because you have JetPack installed on your block and it’s set to block brute force attacks. The solution is to login to the wp-admin page somehow, then go to JetPack > Settings > Brute force attack protection > expand it > and add your IP to the whitelist section. Repeat of course for each time your public IP changes. (Or you could disable JetPack’s protection I guess, I didn’t want to do that).

My guess is JetPack and whatever else that occasionally doesn’t work me is because some of my public IPs/ subnets are in some database somewhere which marks it as belonging to hackers or bad actors and these database are what is used by all these services to blacklist attacks.

ARM deployment – Accepting legal terms

Posted: July 7th, 2019 | Tags: | Category: Azure | §

I haven’t blogged for a while, I know. Except for a few movie posts it’s been pretty silent here. Mostly coz I have been too busy with work and never got a chance to blog. Plus now I use a note taking app (Bear) on my Mac to keep notes, so there’s less requirement for a blog to keep my notes.

I’ve been playing with ARM templates recently and came across the following when I was trying to deploy a Citrix NetScaler (or ADC as they call them now) today:

Azure Error: MarketplacePurchaseEligibilityFailed
Message: Marketplace purchase eligibilty check returned errors. See inner errors for details.
Exception Details:
Error Code: BadRequest
Message: Offer with PublisherId: citrix, OfferId: netscalervpx-121 cannot be purchased due to validation errors. See details for more information.[{“Legal terms have not been accepted for this item on this subscription: ‘xxxx’. To accept legal terms using PowerShell, please use Get-AzureRmMarketplaceTerms and Set-AzureRmMarketplaceTerms API(https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=862451) or deploy via the Azure portal to accept the terms”:”StoreApi”}]

To work around this login to the portal, click to create a new resource, search for “Citrix ADC”, select the one you are interested in deploying (from the drop down), then select “Get started”.

Then go ahead and enable it for all the subscriptions you are interested in. That’s all.

“Night Monkey: Far from Home” is heaps fun!

Posted: July 6th, 2019 | Category: TV Movies Music | §

Night monkey! lol

“Spider-Man: Far from Home” is like a dessert you get to enjoy at the end of a long satisfying meal. It is the perfect way to round up the Avengers series, and especially after “Avengers Endgame” which I wasn’t a huge fan of and reminded me of “The Leftovers” TV series with its over-mopping about the snap and the people who disappeared.

“Spider-Man: Far from Home” is fun. Loads of fun. Makes great use of the fact that Spider-Man/ Peter Parker is a kid who is still in high school and is going through all that high school entails – high school romance, crushes, other boys vying for the girl you love, etc. It also pays great tribute to the Marvel heroes from the opening credits itself with the Whitney Houston song and fun slide show. This feels like a movie firmly set in the Avengers universe and created to round up things in a fun way.

I especially loved the way they toyed with us viewers with the whole multi verse thing in the trailer. I mean, wow, that was something! The first time I saw the trailer I thought “cool, Mysterio the villain”. There were questions about how they are going to bring his character to on-screen as he was into special effects etc. Then the second trailer came out and that hinted at Mysterio being a good guy and this movie being about multi-verses. There were theories in the Internet about how Captain America not returning the stones to the exact moment might have caused a split in the universe, and the fun possibilities that could entail etc. To me it didn’t make sense why the movie makers would put out this big plot point in the trailer itself and take out the fun of discovering it in the movie… but whatever. And then I saw the movie today and all questions got answered. Special effects literally. A layer of distraction upon distraction. All of it now makes sense. Brilliant! :)

As an added plus if the movie wasn’t fun enough already the two post credit scenes add to it. The last one explained a lot of plot holes for me – like why was Nick Fury so dependent on Spider-Man even though the latter was busy. And the first post credits scene sets things up for the next installment, with Spider-Man’s identity being revealed. I wonder how they will take that. Maybe have Peter Parker deny it all of course and have an Iron Man Spider-Man suit pretend to be the real Spider-Man next to it? Who knows! Fun stuff.

Thank you Sony/ Marvel/ Jon Watts for creating this fun dessert of a movie!