[techtalk] strange unknown...

[Brian Sweeney]

WARNING: EMAIL OF PURE COMMENTARY AHEAD.  NO ACTUAL HELP PROVIDED.  SORRY.
;)

Sam-

A doozy, perhaps, but a good one...I KNEW most of the physics that went into
that and still found it interesting.  Thank you!

Steph-

Simplistic response be damned.  Anyone not interested in war stories can
skip ahead, but...

1) Most often cause of "machine not responding" on my production floor...you
guessed it, keyboard cable unplugged (macintoshes, so keyboard/mouse in same
port, and no "bios" to detect this problem when machine restarts)  Of
course, usually the user has hard rebooted the machine several times by the
time they come to me, full of anger and frustration, becuase their machine
REFUSES to co-operate...

2) Most common cause of "machine refusing to boot" trouble ticket requests
on my production floor...machine not plugged in.

3) When using KVM boxes (Belkin makes a nice one of these), ANY of the
keyboard/mouse cables being pulled out of the black box itself can cause NT
to blue-screen.  This took a while to figure out, b/c the first time it
happened the cable was just loose, so would work more often than not on
reboot.  Yuck. :P

4) Another cute black-box related issue...usually one uses the scroll-lock
key to pan between the screens.  Unfortunately, if you don't hit them right,
you end up panning with the scroll-lock down, which makes the machine appear
as if it is not responding.  I rebooted linux/unix boxes several times when
I first started using these KVM boxes before I figured this out.

5) And, finally, in my server room, we've got a number of Solaris boxes, but
no Solaris KVM, so though they can all use the same monitor, they've got
different keyboards.  I practically pounded on a keyboard during a
particularly stressful day in frustration because a box was not taking my
password at the screen saver lockup.  You can probably tell where this is
going.  I turned quite an interesting shade of red when I switched to the
correct keyboard, and continued with my work, which now involved figuring
out what I did to the other machine that I was actually pounding arbitrary
keys into...

I'm sure there are other, more horrible stories than these.  These are just
mine.

Wow.  Rant.  Stopping now.

-Brian

-----------------------------
Brian J. Sweeney
Systems Admin, imagedog.com
email: bsweeney at imagedog.com


>
>I hope that that educated some people!
>
>What a doozy for my first post, goodness, I really got away with myself.
>
>Anywho...try all those troubleshooting steps I suggested, and if it still
>gives you problems, let me know.
>
>Penguins are good luck!
>Sam
>
>
On Tue, 26 Sep 2000 stephanie1200 at netscape.net wrote:

> please don't smack me for such a simplistic response but, you don't have
anything goofy lying around like a mouse cable or something that would rest
on a key under certain conditions?  Like is your keyboard in a rack that
would bump into a key or something?  stuff like that has happened to me lots
of times.  just the other day i brought down a solaris box because the
keyboard cable hit the suspend key as I was sliding it back into the rack
drawer... oops...
>
>
> betka <betka at courtade.net> wrote:
> >
> > hiyis...
> > i have this sound that my machine makes...
> > kinda goes dadadadaadaaa
> > we can not figure out what is doing it
> > no specific time of day ....completely random
> > have changed sound cards
> > nothing ever appears in the logs
> > i am running red hat 6.2 .. but this has accured through several
> > upgrades
> > it also happens even when the sound card is in use (as in real audio)
> > anyone ever have this happen or have any ideas to why it is happening?
> >  ta
> > betka
>
>
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