diagnose/fix boot/software issue: (e.g.) linuxmafia.com host

[jim]

     I've got a scope and various meters and other
electronic stuff. I'm willing to cart them down if
they'll help you.
     I'm willing to bring bakery goods and other
refreshments.
     I'm willing to deliver a working 64-bit Dell 2?5
with hard drive and RAM....
     I'm willing to keep my mouth shut and my
questions repressed.
     Lemme know if you want any of the above.



On 01/04/2015 01:11 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Hi, Michael.  Are you saying you-personally or you-plural wish to come
> over and work through debugging?  Your mail left that unclear.
>
> To be quite frank, I've been on extended vacation, i.e., slacking off,
> and also a bit deterred by the very cold weather.  Thus the lack of
> any hurry doing investigation.  If I'd been determined to deal with
> the problem, it would have been gone long before now, either by
> working through the annoying apparent combination of hardware and
> software problems on the current machine, or by saying the hell with
> antiquated 2001-era PIII hardware, building a from-scratch Debian
> installation, restoring data files from my backup, and grinding
> through the really time-consuming task of rebuilding all the services
> needed.  No question about my ability to do that; I've been able to do
> it several times on an emergency basis since the '80s when I started
> having my own Unix hosts.  I've just been a slacker about dealing with
> this problem.  Sorry to have to admit that, but it's the truth.
>
> If you are offering in-person resources that you seriously hope to
> bring net resources to the table (and I do absolutely respect you, to
> be clear), then thank you, and give me at call at 650-283-7902
> (cellular) to say when you hope to visit.  There was a friend who
> visited to help during my initial round of investigations, where I
> diagnosed the initial problem as an apparent motherboard failure,
> moved the hard drives to a spare VA Linux 2230 box, to my great relief
> verified that all my filesystems were intact, updated my backups, and
> tried and failed to fix the boot configuration before running out of
> patience.  (This was just before I left the country, then came back
> and found that now the _newer_ model 2230 now also produced no video
> and gave the appearance of having suffered motherboard failure.)
>
> My point about the friend (whom I won't name because i don't want to
> embarrass him):  He really did want to help, and I bless him for
> generously donating a Saturday, but in the end all he did was chew up
> my time asking me questions and making incredibly bad suggestions.  On
> the plus side, he was good company, _but_ the work would in all
> honesty have gone more quickly if he hadn't visited at all.  I'm glad
> he came, because I like the guy and do not begrudge the couple of
> hours of my time that he wasted, but -- man! -- wanting to help and
> actually providing help are sometimes _so_ totally different things.
> For example, I'd be concentrating on working through the suspect list
> and my friend would suddenly break my concentration with an
> unbelievably clueless question that relied on a bunch of wrong
> assumptions - and I'd have to then spend half an hour working through
> his misunderstandings to get to the point where he could understand
> why his question hadn't even been relevant or useful, and then
> painfully attempt to return to the original problem I'd been
> considering when he broke my concentration.  The whole day was like
> that.
>
> If your idea is to not visit but rather offer remote assistance, then,
> no thank you.
>
> A couple of you visiting who have relevant experience diagnosing and
> fixing boot configs would be most welcome.  I make really good coffee.
>