[Tfug] Had an interesting little "partial crash" just now...

[Jim March]

Hi all, had an adventure you might find interesting.

I lost WiFi access earlier in the afternoon.  Shrug.  No biggie - put
my cellular modem in, kept on truckin'.

Rebooted towards the evening for other reasons and when I came back
up, Chrome and flash player were slow as molasses...stuttering in
basic Youtube videos even once I let them spool all the way in.  Odd.
My CPU activity meter was going insane.

I run 32bit Ubuntu Lucid with the latest 10.1 flash player...it's been
fine of late.  I have a low-grade Intel "Pentium Dual-core" CPU.

I figured it was the latest beta chrome update gone wrong.  Started up
Firefox - same thing.  Huh?  Loaded and ran Swiftfox...no different.
Opera?  Nope.

Ran System Monitor, told it to show all processes, listed in order of
CPU usage.  Something called "phy0" was bouncing up and down but
showing a lot of it's time at 94% or more usage.  Well that's not
right.

Googled around for phy0 and why it might be snacking on the CPU.  Not
much luck.  Synaptic didn't show it as a package.  So...has to be some
kind of kernel driver, right?

The hits I did for it mostly linked to WiFi access...both Broadcom and
my Atheros-based card.  Hrm.

So...something in the kernel that has something to do with WiFi has
gone bonkers.  And I lost WiFi connectivity hours before that.

Arright...I shut it down, pulled the WiFi card itself (internal
mini-PCI-express).  Duct-taped the ends of the antenna wires down so
they don't short something on the mobo.  Fire it back up and
everything is 100% ('cept for no WiFi).

Full credit to Ubuntu Lucid and it's upstream bits: despite what
appears to be a fried WiFi card, it didn't crash.  And it only took me
about 45min to sort out.

The dead card was a "G" - I'll prolly spend $25 on an "N" at SWS.  No biggie.

I thought it was an interesting testament to the toughness of the Penguin.

Jim