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Inconvenient unreliability of my computer
A few months ago, I was having trouble with my old laptop's power/charging, it was more than time to buy myself a new computer, so I replaced it, hoping for better reliability. Now, I have plenty going on, with moving house and job, sorting out immigration aspects, etc. For various reasons, a lot of my personal computing happens on my laptop computer, not in the cloud.
Yesterday evening, it therefore seemed awkward timing for me to notice the charge level on my plugged-in laptop dropping. Switching power supply, it kept dropping. No amount of wiggling connectors or whatever would persuade it to charge. The same chargers worked fine with my work laptop. I even tried different power outlets. I quickly rsync'd various configuration, etc. off my laptop. On powering it off, it was strange to note that, even when unplugged, the power light on the side remained lit.
My laptop's the only personal Linux machine that I have in the house, mostly I run NetBSD. To easily set up similar configuration, this morning I fired up a virtual container at a hosting provider using their stock Debian image, copied files over to it, then got the most critical functionality up and running. In the meantime, my laptop is now working fine. I daren't wholly migrate back to it quite yet but, really, huh? Could it have gotten itself into some confused state that survives powering down but is cleared by actually running out of charge?
Either way, right now it's so nice to have my usual environment back in my hands. Maybe I ought to have been wrapping it all in apptainer or podman or somesuch all along.
Yesterday evening, it therefore seemed awkward timing for me to notice the charge level on my plugged-in laptop dropping. Switching power supply, it kept dropping. No amount of wiggling connectors or whatever would persuade it to charge. The same chargers worked fine with my work laptop. I even tried different power outlets. I quickly rsync'd various configuration, etc. off my laptop. On powering it off, it was strange to note that, even when unplugged, the power light on the side remained lit.
My laptop's the only personal Linux machine that I have in the house, mostly I run NetBSD. To easily set up similar configuration, this morning I fired up a virtual container at a hosting provider using their stock Debian image, copied files over to it, then got the most critical functionality up and running. In the meantime, my laptop is now working fine. I daren't wholly migrate back to it quite yet but, really, huh? Could it have gotten itself into some confused state that survives powering down but is cleared by actually running out of charge?
Either way, right now it's so nice to have my usual environment back in my hands. Maybe I ought to have been wrapping it all in apptainer or podman or somesuch all along.
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Like, bummer dude! Glad you were able to get it virtually cloud-based for now. We're heading to Phoenix for a few days on Wednesday, I just finished backing up all five of our computers to external drives for off-site storage, it'll be going to the library tomorrow to put in my desk.
One oddity, though. My PC laptop (the others are three MacBook Pros and an iMac) took 2-3x as long as it normally does. Could be the little drive is unhappy. It doesn't get backed up very often as the contents are trivial, though time-consuming, to reinstall. Might have to think about getting a new drive for that purpose at some point.
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I have some weird slowness to what should be USB3 HDDs from NetBSD, I've wondered about some driver inadequacy for the USB chipset.
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I have a story about secure gov't facilities that happened to a friend of mine! He was a contractor who went around to facilities installing a specific type of software, he was fully credentialed and Secret clearance and such. This was probably late '90s/definitely pre-9/11. He's at this one site, guarded by Marines, and realizes he's missing a patch or drivers or something. Asks a military man he's working with if he can connect to his personal FTP server to download what he needs. The guy says sure. So he downloads what he needs, continues working. A few minutes later he hears the sound of a pistol slide being snicked back and a voice saying "Raise your hands and back away from the computers!" It was very quickly straightened out and he learned the value of bringing a complete set of CDs with him from site to site.
I've heard of driver problems with USB3, but that was long ago. I would have assumed they would have all been fixed by now. Though I also understand NetBSD is a bit slow updating.
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They're also old computers running a fairly old NetBSD. I'm behind on my chores, alack.