Thursday, June 24, 2004 7:55 AM Scot L. Harris sagely noted: > > There have been numerous reports that on certain systems > there appear to be some screen savers (people generally point > to the GL screen savers) that cause a system to hang. > > I don't think anyone has nailed this one down but I have seen > enough posts to believe there is something that is broken > under certain conditions. Most of the time if they chose one > simple screen saver or just blank the screen the problem > seems to go away. > > I have seen similar things on some of my systems. In one > case I had a heat problem with a particular motherboard. I > have since replaced the motherboard and have not had any > problems. But I have seen this on another box running the > GLmatrix screen saver. I don't believe this to be a heat > problem. It happens so infrequently on this box however that > I can not report changing the screen saver has resolved this issue. I agree, something's missing in the symptom list. One thing that occurred to me this morning is a practice I follow when using KVMs that I know many (possibly most) others don't. That is making sure that all the systems connected to a particular KVM are all running at the same resolution with the same refresh rates. Over the years, I have found that it takes a high-end KVM to be able to manage hosts with different resolutions and refresh rates. The collorary to this is that nothing will scramble the limited brains of a cheap KVM faster than different hosts running different resolutions and refresh rates. It seems to logically follow (at least to me it does) that if the video switching can be messed up this way then the mouse switching could too. This could also be the screensaver tie-in as it is possible on many screensavers, and the GL screensavers in particular, to set them up to change the resolution when they kick in and set it back when they exit. As a side note, I did have a similar problem with one of my early FC1 boxes. It was my firewall at the time and I was making changes to IPTables to set up a VPN to a client firewall. I screwed up an incremental change and both didn't watch the log nor verify the integrity of my IPTables settings after the change. As a result it was left wide open for almost two hours. I noticed it when I went to make the next change and found the machine acting squirrelly. Luckily the customer FW I was building was still onsite so I unplugged my FW and inserted theirs while I rebuilt mine. After the rebuild (and ever since, as I'm still running that same build) there have been no more mouse problems. Now I realize that's a rather drastic troubleshooting approach. I did it because I needed to be able to vouch for the integrity of the machine being my primary FW. However, if anyone who is experiencing this has the luxury of being able to rebuild, it would be interesting to see if that solved their problem. :) Eric Diamond eDiamond Networking & Security eric<at>ediamond[dot]net
