Tag Archives: Linux

Broken USB – very bad!

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Oh dear, the USB subsystem on my server has died…

[3704510.037506] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host system error, PCI problems?
[3704510.037564] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host system error, PCI problems?
[3704510.037611] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host controller process error, something bad happened!
[3704510.037660] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host controller halted, very bad!
[3704510.037716] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: HCRESET not completed yet!
[3704510.037723] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: HC died; cleaning up

I think I’ll just be rebooting my computer now then. Yes, reboot time.

And I’d just got CUPS working properly too, and was trying the ambitious thing of printing from an RDP connection via my desktop PC to the printer plugged into my server. The printjob made it out the remote machine and into the server’s print queue so I think it’ll work.

Remote nerd alert

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And now for something utterly pointless and wholly nerdy…

I like to use IRC to chat to people. I dislike Windows IRC clients, and much prefer irssi in Linux, which is great because I have a Linux server that I can run it on. Even better is the combination of SSH and GNU Screen, allowing me to SSH into my machine from anywhere while preserving the state of my login.

I also have access to a Windows machine via RDP which is in someone’s office, about 50 miles from here.

For no real reason I thought it’d be amusing to run PuTTy on the remote Windows machine (via the Remote Desktop application on my XP machine), and use it to SSH into my server to chat on IRC.

So, I am using remote desktop which sends compressed 1440×960 bitmaps across the Internet so that I can run PuTTy to see ASCII text via SSH to the computer sat next to me. So efficient, encrypted, compressed SSH data leaves my server, goes through the Internet to the Windows machine. There it gets drawn on the screen inside PuTTy, with the whole screen being captured, compressed and sent back over the Internet to my Windows PC.

Oh, did I mention the remote Windows PC isn’t actually a real PC? It’s a VMWare virtual machine instance running under Windows Server 2003 on a 2.67GHz Core i7.

Earlier I had it printing from the remote machine to the printer plugged into my own PC, which was actually useful, unlike the mess I just described above which was completely pointless but fun. No, I have no life, I’m about to sit and write some SQL.

Ubuntu 9.10 – Tedious Timewaste

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I’m attempting to install Ubuntu 9.10 server edition on my server. To say it’s not going smoothly would be as big an understatement as saying “That Hitler bloke, he was a bit naughty, wasn’t he?”. The damn thing just won’t boot up! It gets as far as saying ‘Grub Loading.’ and then gets no further.

At first I thought it might be the weird combination of IDE controllers and disks I have. I have a 1TB SATA drive, plus two PATA drives. The machine is supposed to boot from one of the PATA drives, and use the SATA as a data drive. This used to work. It even used to work with some crazy extra IDE card in the machine. The motherboard has some half-baked combination of IDE, IDE-RAID and SATA, giving me a total of ten possible disks in the machine. Whoever designed this motherboard was going for a bit of everything, the machine even takes DDR and DDR2 RAM.

Thinking that maybe all this crap was confusing things I switched it all off and pulled out every drive except the drive I wanted to boot from and reinstalled Ubuntu on that. GRUB was installed, it all went well… then the machine rebooted and sat there looking like an oversized doorstop.

I know the BIOS can find the correct disk because I see the ‘GRUB Loading.’ message, but then it seems GRUB fails to find the rest of itself and stops working.

My next plan is to install onto a spare SATA disk I have to see what happens. If that fails I’ll install a previous version of Ubuntu to see if they broke something in this version. It seems they’ve switched to something called Grub2, which has lots of new cool features. Is “booting my system” one of these new features?

Mame Cabinet – With added electroshock therapy

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danger-electric-shock-risk-signAs part of my ongoing “learning by my near fatal mistakes” attitude to life I’ve discovered some interesting problems with my MAME cab. While undergoing the torture known as “getting MAME to work” I found the PC kept crashing, or being just plain weird. Having to reset the BIOS every time it was powered up was getting tedious too.

So, deciding the motherboard was probably to blame I reached my hand in and went to switch it off. While doing this I noticed that whenever I touched the PSU and rubbed my finger over it I felt a strange ‘fuzzy’ bumpy sensation, exactly like the weird vibration aluminium macbook owners sometimes experience. It also caused something to emit a familiar 50Hz humming sound.

After I’d finished playing with this amusement (really, if I’d discovered radioactivity, I’d be dead by now… oooh look at the glowing warm rocks!) I set about finding the source of the faulty ground connection. It didn’t take long, the 4-way power strip I was using had faulty connections where sometimes the earth pin of the plugs going into it didn’t make a good contact with anything.

That’s all fixed now, but the PC keeps crashing so I have no idea what’s wrong. I’ll try removing the wireless ethernet card now, maybe that’s at fault.