Phantom NumLock

A friend’s laptop came back from service the other day in a very strange state.  It was acting as if NumLock was on – but it doesn’t have a NumLock key or the numeric overlay below.  That makes it difficult (impossible!) to enter a password that contains u,i,o,j,k, or l – or do anything else with that part of the keyboard.

Keyboard_10key_snip

There is a way around this.  Use the on-screen keyboard available via the Ease of Access icon on the log in screen.  Click on the Ease of Access icon, then check “Type without the keyboard” and click “OK”.

Login_accessibility

That will bring up the on-screen keyboard.  Click “Options” and check “Turn on numeric keypad” and click “OK”.

Login_onscreen_keyboard_options

You should now have an on-screen keyboard with a NumLock key that will also affect the physical keyboard.

Login_onscreen_keyboard_numlock

This can also be done from within Windows (if you can get that far) via Start -> Accessories -> Ease of Access -> On-Screen Keyboard.

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The Old Man

We lost the patriarch a year ago.  A small remembrance:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.

William Shakespeare – from “The Tempest”

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Intel Sandy Bridge NIC Driver for Linux (e1000e)

The short version of this story is “don’t have any spaces in your directory path.”

My recent multi-boot build was based on an Intel DH67CL motherboard with an H67 chipset.  The NIC is an Intel 82579V, PCI ID 8086,1503.  I downloaded the Intel driver direct from the Intel site: Network Adapter Driver for PCI-E Gigabit Network Connections under Linux.

It built, installed, and worked on several Linuxen in this multi-boot machine – including a live CD image (with persistenct) that I keep in the boot partition – but failed for Suse Enterprise Linux V11.

The error message during build was something like “no rule to make target xxxx.”

Turns out it was nothing to do with Suse.  Since I didn’t have a working NIC, I was downloading to a windows machine, copying to a thumb drive, and copying that to the target Linux install. The download directory on the Windows box was something like “Intel NIC Driver”.  By chance, I had copied its contents to most of my Linux installs, but copied the entire directory to the Suse install.

The spaces in the directory name were confusing make, and causing the less-than-helpful error message.  Got rid of the spaces, and make was happy again.

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Sandy Bridge NIC vs. Solaris 10 & 11

I’ve been working with a new multiboot build: Intel DH67CL motherboard and i3-2120.  It needs to boot Solaris 10 and 11 (among several other OSen) for PCI board and driver testing.

Networking isn’t absolutely necessary, but sure would be handy.  I was prepared to do without, since this is new-ish hardware that may not have Solaris driver support, but was pleasantly surprised – mostly.

The i3 graphics are fine on both S10 & 11, and run my monitor at full resolution out of the box.  Networking worked out of the box for Solaris 11 using the e1000g driver (included in the Solaris distro), but not for ’10.

The chipset NIC is an Intel 82579V, PCI ID 8086,1503.  The usual trick of just adding the PCI ID to the existing driver didn’t help:

update_drv -a -i '"pci8086,1503"' e1000g
Driver (e1000g) successfully added to system but failed to attach ..

Tried every other trick I could think of including copying the Solaris 11 driver. (It still seems like that should have worked using the process below, but maybe I missed something).

Finally out of desperation I installed Solaris 10 U10.  (update 10).  Had been working with U9.  Continuing in this optimistic mode I tried the driver update again:

update_drv -a -i '"pci8086,1503"' e1000g
(no error message - yay!)

Since the networking wasn’t auto-configured during install, I had to manually set up the NIC and configure for DHCP.  Per Rich Teer’s Solaris DHCP guide http://www.rite-group.com/rich/solaris_dhcp.html:

ifconfig e1000g0 plumb  (that's a ZERO on the end)
touch /etc/hostname.e1000g0
touch /etc/dhcp.e1000g0 (which will use defaults)
(verify /etc/nodename is already configured to the desired
hostname if not - edit accordingly)
reboot...

And I had an operating network connection.

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Freeze Your Hard Drive

(Full disclosure: Bob at Bainbridge Computer Services showed me this trick a few years back.)

Sometimes a dead or dying hard drive can be resurrected long enough to rescue important files, or even pull a full clone.

Drives sometimes fail in a heat-related way.  Freezing and then quickly pulling off important data works in a surprisingly high percentage of cases.

I wrap a drive in plastic to prevent condensation (an anti-stat bag is preferred) and freeze it for 2 or 3 hours.  Then pull it out of the freezer and quickly attach to a computer.  If necessary, re-install it in the original host machine, but it’s better to connect via an external USB to IDE/SATA adapter so it can be kept cold longer.  Another approach is to connect to a desktop machine with the case open so the cables can be brought outside the machine.

If using an external adapter or cables to the outside, with the drive still wrapped in plastic, sandwich it between two freezer gel-packs (or bags of frozen peas) and wrap the whole mess in a towel.

If you are lucky, the drive will return to life long enough to copy the important stuff.   In the best case, you may be able to clone the drive and avoid a long re-install process.

Here’s an example of an external USB to  IDE/SATA adapter.  Most of them are USB 2.0 just now.  Since speed is of the essence, USB 3 or a direct IDE or SATA/eSATA connection would be better.

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