[CLUE-Tech] Detecting possible hardware failures

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Jed S. Baer wrote:

*snip*

> I grep'd through my tripwire logs, looked at all the usual logs, etc., but
> haven't found any evidence of tampering, breakin, or any HW messages.

You can't find *any* error messages in /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog
or any others?

> The only background which now seems relevant is that I've been having some
> mouse problems: left button stuck in a button-down state (but only when
> I'm running galeon [or any GTK app?]), and what appeared to be an actual
> HW problem with the switch on the left button on my mouse. I switched mice
> about a week ago, and the only mice-related problems I'm now seeing are in
> GTK apps, e.g. the right-button X paste sometimes doesn't work. Exiting
> all GTK apps has seemed to "reset" this problem, and it reappears only
> intermittently.

This might cause problems in X, but I don't think it would cause the
other problems you described.

> This all has me both concerned, and stumped. The keyboard and mouse are
> obviously reponsive, from a HW point of view. The complete lack of error
> messages is really puzzling. I do log the X server output, and haven't
> seen anything suggestive there either.
>
> Any thoughts on how to get some meaningful diagnostics?

It definitely sounds like a hardware problem. I'm tempted to say it
sounds like overheating or a hard drive about to die -- that's the only
time I've ever had these kinds of random problems that couldn't be
tied to an application. If you have any important data on this machine,
I'd back it up pretty quick.

I could be wrong, anybody else have any ideas?

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- jbrockmeier at earthlink.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
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