Author: Thomas Sandquist

I am a lover of technology and a bit of a tinkerer of all electronics. I have worked in the IT field for the last 23+ years. My initial interest started early in life with my first computer, a Commodore 64 that I used mainly for video games, and continued with my first PC, an Intel i386DX 33MHz with a 100MB HDD and 2MB of RAM (I eventually upgraded it to a 1GB HDD and 6MB of RAM) that I again used primarily for video games along with some school work. I really must recognize that one of the major reasons I got in to computers to begin with was video games! They are a hobby of mine that I try to enjoy whenever possible, both on my Nintendo consoles and PC’s.

Looking for work again…

I’ve found myself unemployed recently. After working consistently for 16yrs I found myself laid off a few months ago and the job market for IT managers hasn’t been good. It’s really not a great time to be looking for a decent paying job in the field. I’m still looking but I’m getting close to the end of my unemployment so I’m definitely getting nervous. I’m hopeful I can find a job where I don’t have to take too big of a backward step here around first of the year. It just sucks having to look at jobs that are a step or two back from my last position instead of jobs that keep me moving ahead… I just can’t seem to find any of those at the moment. Serenity now!

Moving in the right direction…

With the COVID-19 situation improving across Washington State and most of the US it’s nice to start seeing some hints of normalcy coming back. I was able to go to a bar this past weekend with some friends for example. The bar wasn’t allowed to be above 75% occupancy but it was way better than not being able to go to the bar at all like this time last year. As the summer gets going I’m hoping the Washington State Governor sticks to his June 30th reopening date for businesses in the state. Far too many restaurants and bars, other businesses and jobs have been lost during this COVID disaster and it’s critical that we get back to working on recovering from this pandemic as soon as possible to try to turn the economic tide as much as possible for those worst impacted.
I hope you are all doing good and staying safe. Get vaccinated if you can and make sure to stay safe if you can’t/chose not to get vaccinated. – Tom

Asus AMD R9 280X DC2T Artifacting & Stability Fix

Background

I purchased two Asus R9280X-DC2T-GDR5 model AMD video cards back in 2014 for a gaming computer I was building. A few months after building the system one of the video cards failed and needed to be RMA’d (at POST/boot it would show a psychedelic light show instead of displaying those screens correctly, then showed similar effects along with artifacting once it booted in to Windows) which fixed that issue. However over the course of another year or so the computer started experiencing some display artifacting and stability issues, especially when playing video games. I tried some suggestions I found online that seemed to make things work better for awhile but eventually the stability and artifacting issues had become common enough that I couldn’t reliably play some of my games for longer than an hour without experiencing issues or a crash. Unfortunately this was also just outside of the warranty period.

Diagnosis

After doing more research and investigating I began to suspect the issues were being caused by heat. The system, CPU and GPU temps were all below their max values but the fact that the issue began to occur after the computer had been running under load for some time along with my discovery that leaving the side panel off the computer case tended to lessen the frequency of the issue seemed to point me toward a heat related cause. Additional research finally revealed a series of forum posts from other users having similar issues and their ultimate conclusion that the issue was more or less heat related. The best diagnosis I found explained that the GPU cooler for that model video card left some of the memory chips at one end of the card exposed without shielding or a heat spreader on them. These chips were made by Hynix and were originally rated for 1.5v and 1500Mhz. However since the Asus R9280X-DC2T-GDR5 is the TOP factory overclocked model the card was running those chips at 1.6v and 1600Mhz instead. This began to fit with what I was seeing from my card.

Solution

The suggested fix was to RMA the card since this kind of issue should not be happening and plenty of this model card exist and are in use without this issue occurring. However since my card was already out of warranty when I finally experienced and diagnosed this issue that wasn’t an option for me. The best suggestion for those with a card out of warranty (short of replacement) was to try removing the cooler, clean off the original thermal grease, then apply new thermal compound and re-install the cooler (or upgrade to an after market cooler). Another option I found mentioned in forums was to try upgrading to the latest vbios from Asus (since an update had been released back in 2015 to address this type of issue, however I was already running that vbios) or, as a worst case, try flashing the vbios from the Asus R9280X-DC2 model card. The R9280X-DC2 is the non-TOP model of the card that is not factory overclocked. This means the vbios clocks the GPU down to 1000Mhz and the VRAM down to 1500Mhz @ 1.5v. While you do lose your factory overclock many users who did this reported that the cards ran stable after flashing that vbios. I ran in to some issues right off the bat though. Most of the links to the video bios .rom files in the forum posts no longer worked. Fortunately some Google searching led me to the R9280X vbios archive at TechPowerUp. There I was able to grab the latest vbios .rom file for the R9280X-DC2 model card. I was also able to download the ATIFLASH utility (now called AMDVBFLASH) and the GPU-Z software from the TechPowerUp site as well.

Flash Procedure

  • First, download and open the GPU-Z application. Once it’s up and running click on the camera icon in the top right to take a screen shot of the current video card specs. This will be used to compare your specs after the flash process to help confirm the vbios and settings indeed changed.
  • Next you will want to make a backup of your current vbios. This is necessary in case you ever decide to flash it back to stock. In GPU-Z click on the arrow icon next to the UEFI check box and select the save to file option. Make sure to give it a name you will recognize as your stock vbios backup later on if/when it is needed.
  • Now that you have backed up your stock vbios it’s time to flash the new one. IT IS IMPORTANT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ALWAYS RUN A RISK OF BRICKING A DEVICE WHEN A FIRMWARE UPDATE IS BEING FLASHED! YOU ARE PERFORMING THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! I am not responsible for any damage you do to your computer if you are following this procedure. That said, download and unzip the ATIFLASH utility. You will find two executable files in the folder, one that is for Windows and another that is for running from the Command Prompt. I would also suggest you copy the backup .rom file you created with GPU-Z in to this folder along with the new vbios .rom file you downloaded from TechPowerUp or where ever you got it from.
    • Open a Command Prompt window as administrator (you will need administrator priviledges for the flash utility to work correctly) and change to the directory that has the ATIFLASH utility in it.
    • Now type “amdvbflash -f -p 0 XXXX.rom” making sure you replace XXXX.rom with the name of the new vbios file you are trying to flash to the video card. The -f forces the flash and the -p 0 tells the utility which video card to apply the flash to (zero being the default video card).
    • If you get an error during the flash process first make sure you are indeed running Command Prompt as administrator. If you get the message ERROR: 0FL01 or a similar message you may need to unlock the rom on your video card first. Type “Amdvbflash.exe -unlockrom 0” to unlock the rom on the default video card. Then run the previous flash command that you got the error with previously and it should complete the flash process.
  • Once you have successfully flashed the vbios file to your video card you will need to reboot the computer for the changes to take effect. You may also find that you need to uninstall/reinstall your video driver since the vbios flash makes your video card think it’s now a different model card. I didn’t have to reinstall my driver but others have.
  • Launch GPU-Z again and compare the specs now shown with the screen shot image you took before the flash was performed. You should see that the cards model and other specs like clock speeds are different. In my case it now shows the card model as R9280X-DC2 instead of the original R9280X-DC2T. It also shows the GPU clock speed at 1000Mhz instead of the stock 1070Mhz and the memory clock at 1500Mhz.
  • You should be able to follow this same procedure to flash back to your stock vbios backup if/when you need to.

Conclusion

The above process worked for me and so far my video stability issues have not returned. I will update this post if I do experience any further issues or changes in performance but so far everything appears to be working correctly and running stable. I do intend to eventually try removing the GPU cooler and either replacing it or at least removing the old thermal compound and reapplying it to see if I can get better performance and ultimately flash back to the stock vbios file. Until I get a chance to do that though this fix has at least given me the ability to play games on this system without the random stability issues that had really become a problem for me. I hope this has been useful, helpful information for you. – Tom S.

Chrome Browser Extension “The Great Suspender” Includes Malware!

Recently Google disabled and removed the Chrome extension known as The Great Suspender because of violations of the privacy policy including code that appears to be malware that was recently added to the extension. The link below toward the bottom of this post takes you to the discussion of this on GitHub where the projects source code has been hosted for years. Since Google has removed The Great Suspender from the Chrome Web Store anyone looking to install it can no longer find it there and existing users who still have the extension installed will see it has been disabled with a warning message stating the extension contains malware and will also notice any suspended tabs have disappeared!
The quick version of the back story on this is that the original extension developer announced back in June 2020 that they would no longer be continuing development work but had handed off/sold the extension to another entity that intended to continue to develop the product. However little or no development activity was seen for several months until there was a recent update to the Chrome Web Store version of the extension taking it to v7.1.8. This update was not added to the GitHub project page source code though as it still is hosting the last known clean version, v7.1.6. Further investigation showed the new version had added additional tracking and supposed non-Google based web analytics code however as investigators went further down the rabbit hole it was determined the OpenWebAnalytics code was not actually calling code from that service and was instead calling code from servers known to be suspicious from other compromised extensions that Google had previously banned. This triggered red flags for many including Google who, like Microsoft recently did with this extension for their Edge browser, decided to disable and remove it.
Again, more details about the history of the project changing hands, the updates with suspect code and activity seen from this latest suspect code are available at the below GitHub link. If you are a user of the extension such as I was I would strongly suggest you remove it after reading through the information at the below link. It can help explain more on what aspects of the extension were exhibiting malware traits, how to recover any suspended tabs you had open (removing/disabling the extension results in these tabs closing however there are some instructions available on how to recover these if you need to) and also offers some suggestions on alternative extensions that offer similar functionality as The Great Suspender had.

https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263

As always pay attention to what you install and what the Change Log shows when updates are made available to software you are using. It is often suggested that you at least disable if not remove extensions you are not using. Unfortunately since this had been a legitimate extension project for several years combined with how little information was announced when the project changed hands and began to provide updated code in the Chrome Web Store without updating the source code on it’s GitHub repo it made this a kind of perfect storm for a possible malicious actor to change things in a nefarious way without it getting caught immediately. Good luck finding a replacement extension that you like and remember that security is a full time fight in the IT world. I hope this helps any of you who like me were not up to speed on this evolving situation over the last several months. Thanks – Tom S.

Happy New Year!!!

It’s that time again. That time we hit every year, where the current year becomes last year and a new year begins. In this instance, the year 2020 hasn’t been anything remotely close to like what I have experienced in my 40 years aboard this chunk of rock orbiting our sun. Between the COVID-19 pandemic impacting every facet of our lives, inept and corrupt governments across the globe acting in their own best interest instead of their citizens best interests, economic upheaval that has been going on for years but has finally come to a head due to the impacts of the pandemic along with so much more that has gone wrong it’s a wonder more of us didn’t just decide to say “Fuck It” and stay in bed the last 9-12 months.
With that in mind it will be interesting to see if we start off feeling the same way in 2021, if it will be better or if it will be worse. True, the COVID vaccine has started rolling out worldwide giving some hope to our situation but the truth is that the vaccine alone is not the cure to what is ailing us as a species let alone as a people or even individually as yourselves. The economic destruction that has gone on in 2020 will not be easily or quickly resolved just because the calendar year has changed to 2021, just like most other problems each of us has in our lives. That all said though I do wish each of you a Happy New Year and the best of luck. To a better year in 2021 (it shouldn’t take much to do that so I’m really hoping we can all find ourselves in a better spot soon)!

Thanks,
Tommy S.

Another Project: Building a New Linux Mail Server – Planning

For several years I have made it a point to build and maintain my own Linux based Mail Servers for my personal email domains. At one point in my career I was even building and implementing these Linux mail servers for business customers who wanted to have more control over their company email accounts without paying a provider to manage and host them all. This was prior to the “Cloud” revolution in online services and free email accounts with huge amounts of storage. However it was also toward the beginning of high-speed, dedicated internet connections which meant companies who didn’t have a ton of email traffic to/from their server could affordably bring their mail server in house.

Most of those customers have since moved back to outsourcing their email to a cloud host. However I still like hosting my own email server (I too have moved this from in-house to a data center based server) and continue to keep a Mail Server How-To guide going based on the software and configuration I use. I am currently set to upgrade the mail server to the latest and greatest software. My intention was to use CentOS 7 or CentOS 8, and so far these are the base operating systems I’ve used in my testing. However I am somewhat leery about IBM’s purchase of RedHat and what unexpected impacts that could have, and while I absolutely love RedHat and have used RH or RH based distros near exclusively for the last 25 years I have begun to look at using Ubuntu or Debian in more of these servers. So with that in mind I am preparing to build two test mail server VM’s, one using the RH Based CentOS and the other running on Ubuntu. I’m currently planning to use Sendmail as my MTA, Spamassasin along with MailScanner or AMAVIS for anti-spam controls, and Dovecot for POP/IMAP services.

I’ll be starting to work on this project this weekend so expect to see more updates in the coming days/week. Any of you who have suggestions please feel free to leave a comment. Below is a link to my old (more like ancient) Linux projects page which has a link to one of the old, original versions of my Mail Server How To (this version has not been updated in many years so I would not suggest following it to build a mail server these days… just provided for historical purposes) along with some other old projects and info that are Linux related. Expect to see updates to these pages soon though as I get back in to more of these projects. Thanks – Tom S.

Tom’s Fedora Linux Pages: http://www.toms-games.com/linux/index.html

Nintendo Leak Reveals Some Cool Stuff…

I was browsing through slashdot.org earlier tonight and came across a posting about a trove of leaked Nintendo source code for games across multiple platforms from the SNES upward. Released last Friday and dubbed the “Gigaleak” on 4chan, there have been several interesting and down right cool extras and goodies that never made it to production found in the data dump. Check out the Slashdot article for more links and info regarding this. – Tom S.

https://games.slashdot.org/story/20/07/27/1933227/huge-apparent-leak-unearths-nintendos-prototype-history

Happy 4th of July!!!

I know I’m posting this a few days late but I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Independence Date! The fourth of July is always one of my favorite national holidays. This is in part because you get to play with explosives (fireworks) or at least get to go see some pretty good fireworks displays being put on by different Cities/Counties/Municipalities/Native America Tribes/Companies and of course your local amateurs blowing up whatever they can! However this year many of the community fireworks displays were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the heard of crowds gathering possibly increasing the rate of viral transmission in those areas. It seems in many of these areas the locals have taken it upon themselves to put on their own firework displays and in many cases they were a nice change from the usual large public displays.
Again, Happy 4th of July and I hope you all were able to enjoy what you could of it with your friends and family that you were able to! – Tom S.

Coming Out Of Lockdown (Maybe)… The Ongoing Saga Continues!?!

Over the last couple of weeks several states that had started on their path back to reopening and ending the COVID-19 lockdowns in stages/phases have found their confirmed infection counts increasing. In some cases this has been an exponential increase that has put pressure back on our healthcare system and limited or even exhausted ICU bed capacity. An increase of some kind appeared to be likely as people started coming out of quarantine and were around each other more. However between some states moving ahead more quickly than others despite their case counts not being ideal for such measures, the politicizing and fighting that has erupted from states/counties/cities suggesting (and even requiring in some cases) masks be worn along with the wave of angst and anger in our society not only about the response to this virus and it’s social impact but also the issues of equality in our country has made things get really crazy really quick. Some states are slowing their return to normalcy progress while others are actually imposing new restrictions, reversing course from the previous few weeks where they were pushing to reopen regardless of the concerns being voiced by medical experts and some community leaders. We will have to see how things look in another week or two but between the nice weather, the lockdown restrictions being softened and folks eagerness to rush back to their “old” lives has set us up for a near perfect storm it appears for this virus to start making it’s comeback before we really ever reached the end of the “first wave”.
Be safe out there and please do what you can to limit the spread of this virus, if not for your sake, then for the sake of others who are at potential risk around you. Good luck out there! – Tom S.