Re: Damned hardware! ;-)

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
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