Hi Roy.

14-Nov-03 12:11:04, Roy J. Tellason wrote to all


 RJT> Some of you folks might have heard that it got a bit windy around
 RJT> these parts yesterday..

 RJT> At one point the electric glitched,  and several machines
 RJT> crashed,  but all came up okay

 RJT> Last night,  a bit after 11,  all power went off,  and stayed off
 RJT> for maybe 2 minutes or so.  When it came back up this box was
 RJT> okay,  the firewall/router was okay,  and the linux
 RJT> server/primary machine was giving me grief

 RJT> What,  battery dead?  Ok,  but that should make any difference if
 RJT> I don't shut it off,  right?  Wrong.  I'd go through and put all
 RJT> of the settings in,  and then hit "save and exit" and I'd get the
 RJT> _same_ message!  Go back into setup, and there's nothing there
 RJT> but the default settings

 RJT> Checked the battery,  it's a common coin cell,  CR2032,  and
 RJT> measures 0.5v! Never saw one get that low...

They often don't power the cmos from the motherboard, and only rely on the
coin cell. linux only needs the cmos to boot.

 RJT> other reasons (keyboard connector's in a strange place),  and
 RJT> checked that -- 2.8v -- but it gives me the same result

2.8 should be enough to hold the data, maybe it's not enough for the
writes to the cmos to "take"  OTOH the CMOS could be dead

 RJT> Ok,  time to start swapping hardware...

 RJT> Giving me "assertion flubbed" (?!) and "segment
violation" and I
 RJT> see things loading that weren't supposed to be loading according
 RJT> to _my_ configs.  Takes an awful long time to get to a login
 RJT> prompt,  and then when it does before I can try anything I see
 RJT> another segment violation,  kernel PANIC

unfamiliar hardware - time for a rescue floppy.

 RJT> Or maybe not,  I feel lousy,  probaby have that bug that's been
 RJT> going around, and won't be going anywhere today...  :-(

or maybe it's from staying up all night fighting baulky hardware. :-(

 -=> Bye <=-

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