Re: Problem after pluggin usb keyboard out
From: Marcelo Magallon (ax11w9h001_at_sneakemail.com)
Date: 10/05/03
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Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2003 15:19:43 +0200
On Wed, 01 Oct 2003 14:36:40 +0100, Khalid Schofield wrote:
> I'm put some tape on the plugs or a cable tie to stop people pulling it
> out if I were you. Thats probably the easiest fix (sad I know but easy
> fixes are fastest ;-> ).
ROTFL!
Yes, we are working on that solution already :-)
Just to give you some background on the problem, this is a Powerwall
installed in an auditorium. The Onyx that drives this system sits in
the machine room with a whole bunch other stuff. Video and input signals
are transported 100+ m from here to the Powerwall via a USB link. The
installation in front of the Powerwall is still in the works, which
means that for now keyboard and mouse are stuffed with other devices on
a table/desk and connected to a USB plug coming out of the wall. Every
now and then, someone just *has* *to* *move* something on that desk and
they intuitively get the keyboard/mouse out of the way...
A couple of weeks ago, a couple of hours before a demo, it just happened
that one of the persons preparing the demo plugged the keyboard/mouse
out, moved something and plugged it back it. The keyboard didn't work
anymore. For some weird and until-this-day-unknown reason, the machine
had lost its network configuration. This person went into panic mode and
applied the Windows solution: the machine got rebooted. Interestingly
/etc/ioconfig.conf still had, after the reboot, the duplicated entries
for the USB input devices. Result: the X-server does not find the
mouse/keyboard. And there's still no network. No problem, right? You
just use the serial console. If only there had been one :-( Some months
ago, while configuring a RAID system attached to the Onyx, I had
unknowingly killed the serial-console (yes, when this dawned upon me it
was extremely embarrassing). So, no console, no network and no serial
console. What do you do? You put the CD into the tray and boot from
there. Except that this didn't work either, all we got was a wonderful
exception from CPU0 when trying to boot. Sash worked and I could poke
around the filesystem... in read-only mode :-) By some strike of luck, I
turned the machine off (and I really mean shut down everything), then
back on and it decided it had made enough trouble for a day and that it
was time to boot from the CD again :-)
The demo went rather well.
Now I have this:
# Remove USB devices from the ioconfig.conf file
if [ -f /etc/ioconfig.conf -a -w /etc/ioconfig.conf ] ; then
perl -ni -e 'm,/usb/, || print' /etc/ioconfig.conf
fi
in /etc/init.d/chkdev just before ioconfig gets run, which means the
nightmare situation I described above gets preempted (someone panics,
reboots the machine, and k/m should get back to normal), but I'd still
like to know WTF is going on.
Cheers (and sorry if this sounds like something for a.s.r.)
Marcelo
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