Month: May 2016

Thank you Fitbit for exceptional Surge replacement handling

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I’d had my Fitbit Surge for almost a year when the strap broke. I was worried this was going to be an issue because I had heard that Fitbit were a bit picky about how potential replacement units were being handled and that the “this is to be considered normal wear and tear” statement was coming my way. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It took less than two weeks from my initial e-mail to the arrival of a replacement Surge, and that included DHL freight to Sweden.

From start to finish, this replacement procedure was running through a very well drilled piece of support machinery. Thank you very much @Fitbit and @FitbitSupport for professional service. And now, it’s time for another 10km walk, tracked by the Surge 🙂

// I am not currently, and have not previously been employed by Fitbit 🙂

 

SSH keys are no longer working after upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04.LTS – Help!

I recently upgraded one of my laptops to Ubuntu 16.04.LTS (going from 14.04.LTS). The upgrade went very smooth and I have no issues with the resulting operating environment 🙂 Having said that, I quickly discovered a quite serious issue for me when I attempted connecting to one of many servers I need to get into. All of a sudden, my SSH key was no longer accepted by the server, and I was prompted for a password! WTF!?

I immediately feared the worst and started looking at the server(s), tailing log files, enabling debugging, etc. No trace was to be found other than that no key was presented by the client. The servers were intact, the authorized_keys had not been compromised, and vanilla ice cream was still the number one flavor. The problem is not with Ubuntu 16.04.LTS. The problem is with my SSH key, as well as a recent change in “acceptable keys” by OpenSSH, version 7.

Doing “ssh -vvv user@server.com” told me that the SSH client couldn’t find an acceptable key to present to the server. After having figured that out, and facepalming for a few seconds, I added this to my /etc/ssh/ssh_config file:

PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-dss

Saved the file and tried again. Voila! One could say many things about using this type of SSH key, but rest assured I will change mine. You should too if you run into this problem. This is a workaround, not a fix or a solution. So sit down with some vanilla ice cream (with actual vanilla) and something nice to drink and go through the process of replacing your public SSH keys everywhere.