On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Ken Moffat <[email protected]> wrote: > Since there has been a complaint that this list is too quiet, I > figured I might as well moan about that most unreliable of > purchases, i.e. hardware! > > Earlier this year, I needed more DASD^H^H^H^H disk space, so I > bought new disks - that forced me to get a new mobo, the via > chipset on the old one didn't understand current SATA (v3?) - at > least wikipedia pointed me to the problem. Once I'd got a new mobo, > the 3 disks (500Gb '/', 2x1TB RAID-1 for data) were fine - that was > in mid March. Since then, the system disk started to fail, so I > replaced it. Then, I had some (unrelated) mail errors while I was > on holiday, which caused me to login directly once I got home, > instead of using ssh : loads of error messages about one of the RAID > drives on tty1. Eventually, I replaced the drive [ and boy, I'm > glad I only use RAID-1 : I managed to swap the wrong drive, so its > resync failed with unreadable errors ] and all is well there - for > the moment. Although, my attempt to summarise the smartmontools > output is obviously defective, the summary had appeared to show all > was well. > > So, back to my desktops, and the Ctrl key on my keyboard became > intermittently sticky. Oddly, I only noticed this while upgrading a > kernel on *one* machine, and it took a long while to establish that > it was an intermittently faulty keyboard, not a bad kernel. Swapped > the keyboard, the x86 desktops seem ok. > > A couple of days ago (and, I think, after swapping the keyvboard), I > finally upgraded the kernel on my ppc64 to 3.0.0. Booted ok and > xorg/nouveau seemed ok, but vim (in urxvt) was "difficult" - only the > most basic keys worked, no cursor movement from the arrows or PgUp / > PgDown, and no ESC although Ctrl-C gave me ESC. Weird. Very Weird. > > Tonight, I sat down with 'diff' on the configs (nothing likely), > and then used a pen and paper to record the values from showkey and > xev, for 'good' and 'new' kernels. Bizzarely, they were all > identical. I then tried to edit my notes using vim under urxvt, and > everything was fine. > > Summary - > > Hardware: I hate it. > > ĸen > --
reminds me of my own keyboard problems, where it would appear that control (or alt) got stuck, or weird keyboard behavior. Never found the reason why, but disabling interrupt/dma remapping in the kernel got rid of my problem. -CONFIG_DMAR -CONFIG_INTR_REMAP -- Nathan Coulson (conathan) ------ Location: British Columbia, Canada Timezone: PST (-8) Webpage: http://www.nathancoulson.com -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
