[2964] in Release_7.7_team
broken linux machines
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Mon Sep 24 14:24:21 2001
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 14:24:19 -0400
Message-Id: <200109241824.OAA02065@pothole.mit.edu>
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
CC: larugsi@mit.edu
Well, this is somewhat interesting. I found (and fixed) a broken linux
machine in W20 and then found the person who broke it. Apparently
someone (else) has been going around reconfiguring some of them to run at
1600x1200, which is generally considered popular, but screwing up some
other settings (in particular, keyboard repeat rate), which my
correspondent had tried and failed to fix, in a manner catastrophic for
the X configuration.
This caused the X server to endlessly restart, which seems to have caused
a bunch of different people to try power-cycling it in order to get it to
work during the four days it was hosed, which did nothing but really hose
hda7 so that it wouldn't even try booting any more.
More generally, people seem to be quite free about running Xconfigurator
and screwing up and/or "fixing" the X configuration on cluster machines,
mostly the latter. We'd previously talked about something to reset the X
configuration for the next patch release, but now I'm thinking that (if
people are going to keep screwing with it) it would be more appropriate
as part of reactivate.
Do we want to reexamine the 1600x1200 vs. 1200x1024 issue? I currently
plan to force everything to 1200x1024. (This could also be a login
option, I suppose...)
