Why I never reboot. (Aka. "How come you never upload pics from your cameraphone anymore?")
I'm a Linux geek, and I love uptime. I've had machines go a year and a half without a reboot. It's partially a matter of pride.
With my current computer, it's also partly a matter of necessity. I reboot my computer so rarely, that I think it forgets how to boot. Rebooting is never, ever clean, and it usually involves at least a full powerdown to get it to boot cleanly.
I have no idea why it's such a pain. I suspect my case is possessed. My last motherboard did the same thing, and now chrispee42 has it in her machine and she reboots all the time with no issue. Clearly, this is unique to me.
So earlier, I decided I wanted to upload a bunch of pics from my camera (which also happens to be my phone). I plug it in, and Nautilus (or whatever Ubuntu 8.04 is using to run the desktop) can't find my phone. I don't know what dies, but I generally have pretty awful luck with my phone when I plug it in after X and GNOME has been up for awhile. So, I restart X and GNOME with a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
X comes back, GNOME comes back, I log in and I start slurping files off of my phone. That goes just peachy, but I notice lots of dialogs take forever to open (such as the "File -> Save" dialog in GIMP, or the preferences dialog in gnome-terminal). I take that as a sign to fully reboot.
And so, a couple hours ago I rebooted. I haven't managed to get my machine working since.
First off, shutdown -r now will send the machine to reboot, but it always freezes during the BIOS phase of things. So I power-cycle. It gets further, but hangs during boot. Etc... Things just hang and/or fail with a reboot in weird places.
After a few aborted attempts at booting I decide to blow all the dust out of the machine, throwing me into allergy city.... and not fixing a damn thing.
Basically, reboot falls into one of these categories: It fails before it gets out of BIOS, it fails during the bootup scripts, it fails shortly after logging in with an unexplained freeze, or somehow mysteriously, everything works.
Right now, my machine is doing the whole mystery freeze after booting. It's not temperature related so far as I can tell.
In case you're wondering how I'm posting this, I'm posting it from my dedicated VPN box that I use for connecting to work. Wheeeeeeee.....
With my current computer, it's also partly a matter of necessity. I reboot my computer so rarely, that I think it forgets how to boot. Rebooting is never, ever clean, and it usually involves at least a full powerdown to get it to boot cleanly.
I have no idea why it's such a pain. I suspect my case is possessed. My last motherboard did the same thing, and now chrispee42 has it in her machine and she reboots all the time with no issue. Clearly, this is unique to me.
So earlier, I decided I wanted to upload a bunch of pics from my camera (which also happens to be my phone). I plug it in, and Nautilus (or whatever Ubuntu 8.04 is using to run the desktop) can't find my phone. I don't know what dies, but I generally have pretty awful luck with my phone when I plug it in after X and GNOME has been up for awhile. So, I restart X and GNOME with a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
X comes back, GNOME comes back, I log in and I start slurping files off of my phone. That goes just peachy, but I notice lots of dialogs take forever to open (such as the "File -> Save" dialog in GIMP, or the preferences dialog in gnome-terminal). I take that as a sign to fully reboot.
And so, a couple hours ago I rebooted. I haven't managed to get my machine working since.
First off, shutdown -r now will send the machine to reboot, but it always freezes during the BIOS phase of things. So I power-cycle. It gets further, but hangs during boot. Etc... Things just hang and/or fail with a reboot in weird places.
After a few aborted attempts at booting I decide to blow all the dust out of the machine, throwing me into allergy city.... and not fixing a damn thing.
Basically, reboot falls into one of these categories: It fails before it gets out of BIOS, it fails during the bootup scripts, it fails shortly after logging in with an unexplained freeze, or somehow mysteriously, everything works.
Right now, my machine is doing the whole mystery freeze after booting. It's not temperature related so far as I can tell.
In case you're wondering how I'm posting this, I'm posting it from my dedicated VPN box that I use for connecting to work. Wheeeeeeee.....