first week flew by
Well, my first week at the new job flew by. It was a good week though. I've learned a ton, and there's so much more yet to come. My cube looks like, well, a crazy hardware lab. I've got half a dozen monitors of varying shapes (CRT & LCD), sizes (14" up to 24") & values (\$70 to \$4000), and enough high powered dual athlon workstations to sink a small ship. I was also given a nice, new, DVD burner today.
I haven't had time to install it yet, but that's cause i finally cut loose from the winXP PoS box to my nice FC3 box. Actually, I had a bit of drama this morning on the FC3 box when the mouse started acting wonky. By wonky, I mean, it was not moving smoothly, and there were a ton of USB errors (it was a USB mouse, duh). I couldn't figure out what was wrong, since it was all working ok the day before, but i didn't really tax it much the day before, other than running firefox for a short while. I did notice that there a ton of devices (all 3 USB controllers, plus the soundchip on IRQ12). Since i didn't have the patience to debug my USB mouse, i figured i'd just yank it out, and replace with PS2. It was all downhill from there. That somehow made the problem worse until the mouse locked up altogether. I ssh'd into the box, and noticed that somehow X had caused a kernel Oops. I wasn't sure wtf was going on at that point, and thought that maybe i needed to back down on the version of the nvidia driver (note, that turned out to not to be the issue at all). So I tried switching to runlevel 3, but since X had Ooops, and become a zombie, I couldn't unload the nvidia module. At that point my ssh session went to hell, and I had to hit reset. It was all kinds of craziness at that point. The first boot, the xfs kernel module in the initrd failed to load. Next time, syslogd segfaulted. Third time X Oopsed again. At this point it was clear that something was very very broken. My money was on the RAM, since i had canabalized an older workstations's RAM (2x256MB) to bring this one up to 768MB. So i went to the lab, and found to very nice 1GB sticks. First thing i did was just boot with the original 256MB. That allowed me to determine whether the RAM was at fault. Thankfully, the box booted properly with the 256MB, so i tried adding one of the 1GB sticks, but it never got detected, so the mobo obviously couldn't handle that much in a single slot. Back to the lab, with 2 more 256MB sticks, and this time life was good. Everything booted cleanly, and I had 768MB.
Beyond that I spend the day reviewing some documentation for a dept wiki, and working on a few bugs. It was a good first week.