Problems with Hotplug

[ABrady]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 03:55:12 +0100
Vincent Trouilliez <vincent.trouilliez at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

> > But......it hung up on the first reboot this time. 
> > ...The only thing I can see being a problem is USB. That's a
> > keyboard, mouse, 2 jump drives, CD-writer, external 80GB drive.
> > There are 2 external USB hubs, an internal hub and 2 USB cards in
> > addition to the builtin USB ports. The mouse and keyboard are both
> > Logitech, shared through a KVM switch with a Mac.
> 
> Oh my God, is really all that stuff USB ???

Yes.

> Just remove ALL that stuff (you don't K/B nor mouse to boot !) and see
> what happens, then plug them back, one at a time. For each device you
> add, boot twice or thrice to be "about" sure the problems doesn't
> reappear. And don't use the dwithc for K/B and mouse, you never know.

I can remove the externals easy enough. But that's basically a couple of
drives and a couple of memory sticks. To remove the KVM means no shared
keyboard. That's OK for testing, but that will never do in the real
world. I can VNC tot the Mac forsome things, but there are times I
absolutely must go directly to it to get some things done.

> I have never heard/read nothing but trouble stories with USB devices,
> whatever the kind of device. I haven't yet seen the usefulnes of USB
> devices, so sure enough, no USB stuff will ever make it to my
> computer.

I had a lot of trouble using the 2.4 kernels in the eary days. But I
have little or no trouble now. The only time I usually run into
difficulty now is if I change between a 2.4 and  2.6 or the other way.
Drives like to change from what fstab says they should be and makes the
first boot fail. I plan to solve that through scripting when I get a
round tuit.

> Keybaord and mice have already a port of their own : PS/2, use it,
> it's bullet proof, why re-invent the wheel ?

Because I connectto a Mac and I have to share keyboard and mouse. Macs
don't have PS/2 ports.

> Scanners ? should be SCSI.

That's getting harder and harder to find. Far and away more expensive,
too.

> CD-writer external ? Get SCSI one as well.

Had one. I blew up. It cost 5 times what the internal ATAPI does that I
shoved into a USB case, and so far the ATAPI el-cheapo has outlasted the
Yamaha SCSI drive by a factor of 2.

> USB sticks ? Yes that's convenient, but then again, why not just use a
> re-writeable CD.

Every CDRW I've tried to use on an internal CD writer (non-USB
interface) has failed since late in the 2.2/early in the 2.4 kernel
days. I never understood why. Even the SCSI drive that worked with them
for several months stopped working and could never be coaxed to play
nice again.

The USB drive OTOH works with them just fine. I use them on that drive.
But if I'm going to use USB for CDRW, I can just as easily use USB for
the memory sticks. They're more easily transported, too.

> Broadband modem ? Use Ethernet interface.

I do.

> The only thing that's interesting with USB, is connecting your digital
> camera and get it hotplugged as a storage device, then just drag and
> drop your pics into a local drive. That is wonderful. Thank god this
> seems to work fine. But for everything else, I would stay away from
> USB !!

I use it for that as well.

I also don't have a USB printer. it's parallel, and it's networked via a
print server for 4 machines to use.

Not using USB isn't an option. Temporarily removing some things for
testing would work, but I need a solution that allows them to stay. Or
most of them to stay. I already tried by removing a couple of pieces and
that didn't work. If I remove all external and it still doesn't go, I'll
have to stop trying.

I had a similar problem when trying Mandrake 9.1 on this machine. I
didn't use 9.1 because I need USB. Even so, that would boot OK, but it
wanted to probe every USB device 10 times each, making the boot process
take nearly an hour. This only happened during the install. It probed
too many times afterward, but it would finish after about 15 minutes
during a normal boot.

I've used multiple versions of Mepis, Knoppix, Kanotix, Yoper,
PCLinuxOS, MDK, Fedora, Libranet and even a copy of Xandros. None of
them gave me this problem. The closest was MDK 9.1, as mentioned. All of
the others worked, though I still have the problem mentioned when
changing kernels. Since I rarely ever need to do that it's not really a
big problem.

I'm confident there's an answer. Dumping hardware isn't it, and it's
certainly not something I was hoping to hear.

I've been hoping to try Ubuntu out since I've heard a few others rave
about it. I know it'll all work out eventually. I'm just hoping it can
be sooner rather than later.