My Absence Past Few Days Explanation/Apology

[nexbender]

For those used to seeing me every day on Galt's CTF: Apparently I had not one but two dead network cards; the one I was using when the problems started, and the one I switched to because I thought it was fine - until I discovered otherwise after fighting with my 'puter for a couple days. Suffice it to say, if you ever see tulip_stop_rxtx() failed (CSR5 0xfc664010 CSR6 0xff972117) in dmesg, just huck the card in the trash and get a new one.

Anywho, I have played some offline today to verify the GPU is in good shape (I modded the firmware on it a while back to get a bit more out of it), I'm not seeing any other errors with xorg or kernel borks or resource allocation failure on the pci bus, so I'm calling this resolved when I get off my bum and go get a shiny new NIC to stick in the box.

Fingers crossed, cyall tonight!

Hugs and kisses,
*BENDER*

[:)]

I got a 100 Mbps card from YMCA for 50 cents and it works under linux. Highly recommend. them.

[nexbender]

So, turns out I also had a dying keyboard. Everything decided to fail at once, I guess. I used that keyboard for about 5 years and it saw everything - coffee, coffee puke, food, cat fur, etc - had taken it apart and cleaned it at least three or four times - but I guess something on it's tiny brain finally shorted out, cuz once I hold down a key, it never stops sending that input! Not good for root shell! I'm typing on a 4 dollar piece of crap that makes my carpel tunnel act up just looking at. I'll pick up a usable one later today.

Oh, and I bought a NIC I like, has the realtek 8169 chipset.

[Shoe]

I've stole 3-4 100mbps NICs from my high school

(well, stole with permission; there was literally a box overflowing with the things in the tech closet, and all the new mobos had onboard so they were just there)

[nexbender]

I've stole 3-4 100mbps NICs from my high school

(well, stole with permission; there was literally a box overflowing with the things in the tech closet, and all the new mobos had onboard so they were just there)

You find a gigabit card in there, send it my way.
I'm going stricly gigabit for my lan - the r8169 was the first step. Wife's getting a laptop so I can have my other box back to build out as a real router - modded dd wrt just ain't hacking it. I'll probably go freebsd for that since I'm used to using it as a router OS, though I may go Linux for a change (I've only setup one linux netfilter box as firewall/router and I was never happy with it, but that was 2.4 series era, so blah de blah).

And back on my topic, sorta: I'm still getting some weird behavior and I can't nail it down, though it does appear to be network related. I can play offline no probs (Obby, I did run Sauerbraten too and it was flawless, even online, probably cuz it's a thick client), but online, even setting rate to 10000, input seems to freeze up, most often when I hit top wish speed - running flag back, mid-air at top speed, suddenly the forward gets stuck and it's 3-5 seconds before input responds after I let go of keys. I'm fairly certain now that the keyboard I thought was dying is in fact fine....

Long story short, unless I have a Eureka moment, I'll probably be out of game most of tonight while I run through changing one little thing at a time (and there are a lot of little things, cuz I run a custom RT kernel - and I'm trying to figure out how to run nex with rtprio 99 without starving the EHCI host bus).

Just remembered I've got to fix up my aunt's laptop, so tonight's a loss, feh.

[nexbender]

OK, it had to be the motherboard, because I finally eliminated every other possibility and I'm looking squarely at inexplicable bus contention. No shared IRQs, but when I hit the PCI bus with requests at more than one device, one of them never gets time and its driver goes out to lunch. Or mouse and/or keyboard on PS/2 or anything on USB stops responding/starts repeating some last input. And the rtc driver started reporting tsc source unstable.

So I stopped by Fry's on the way to work this afternoon and picked up a new mobo. Hopefully this solves it. I'm just not looking forward to ripping apart the box, cuz invariably it takes twice as long as it should and I bleed on something. But on the plus side, the new mobo supports 8 gigs o' ram, so I can keep shoving memory at it as finances allow.

[Silica Gel: Do Not Eat]

Double check the power supply. I've run across a few that didn't supply enough power on some of the rails. The systems would boot but had random problems.
Hate to see ya blow out that nice new mobo with a bum ps!

[John Galt]

ditto on the possible psu problem. we've all been burnt by that!

[nexbender]

Yeah, no, power supply's a big-ass antec, very clean power...already been there/done that with underpowering, in fact my wife (the certified hardware guru*) was the one who insisted I get the antec last year. This morning I booted the old mobo into bios, went into hardware monitoring, and just let it sit there for a few hours. I noticed a tiny bit of bounce on one of the +5 rails, and I'll keep it in mind (especially since I don't want the wife pulling another i-told-ya-so), but if the psu is really failing, it is failing more slowly and gracefully than any I've ever seen.

*Yes, she has an A+ cert, blonde hair, blue eyes and is teh anime sexy. So when hardware goes haywire on me, I figger it's just God trying to restore balance to the universe.

[Silica Gel: Do Not Eat]

*Yes, she has an A+ cert, blonde hair, blue eyes and is teh anime sexy.

Wow! the only thing hotter than that would be Jessica Alba with a beer in each hand.
You lucky bastard!!!