The Tenuous Link

I've spent (wasted) a lot of time with a disappearing network connection this holiday. I have a (suprisingly expensive) computer from Hush Technologies that has been quietly reliable for most of the time that I've owned it. In the last few months I've collected a lot of gadgets that connect to my LAN and stream music or video. With perfectly bad timing the network on my PC suddenly started being flakey, and then disappeared altogether. It made my new gadgets look very unimpressive when I tried to show them off!

Tech support at Hush got back to me quickly to tell me that they haven't tested the motherboard with Windows Vista, implying that the problem might be normal behaviour.

I originally noticed the problem when the network connection to and from the PC disappeared, but came back if the machine was rebooted. Changing the network cable and switch (gigabit or 100 Mbps) didn't make any difference. I opened up the case, and noticed that the mobo chipset cooler wasn't attached properly any more.

The picture shows that the spring on one side of the cooler isn't connected to anything. On the other side it is hooked on to a little metal loop on the mobo. I flipped the PC over and shook it and the missing metal loop appeared.

My best guess was that the chipset was overheating and the network problem was the first symptom of that. I'm not sure now, because the network is missing even after a cold reboot after the machine has been off all night.

Hush gave me the option to return the machine to Germany for repair of the the heatsink, but I wanted to avoid that so that I could get on with some important bits and pieces. I first thought that I could just take out the motherboard and solder the loop back in place, but everything is packed in fairly tightly so that job looked fiddly. I decided to fix the loop back in from the top using glue. ("Plastic Weld", two part epoxy from Maplin). It wasn't a fantastically neat job and the glue splodged out and touched one end of a capacitor on the top of the board, but it has been holding the loop in for the last 4 days or so.

Unfortunately, when I fixed the heatsink spring back on the loop and put the lid on the machine the network was completely missing (the card wasn't listed in Device Manager, even choosing the "Show hidden devices" option). I tried doing a system restore to a slightly earlier configuration just in case Windows Update had broken the driver, but that didn't help (and then I noticed that my USB devices were now unrecognised too!)

I booted the machine using a Knoppix 5.1.1 CD, and the network was still missing, and the USB peripherals still behaving strangely. Unplugging everything and plugging them in to different sockets brought them all to life in Knoppix (at least, they all appeared in the KInfo System Information). Maybe it was removing a USB extension cable that fixed it all? I also plugged a USB ethernet adaptor in, but it was a USB 1.1 device so backing up files to the network was painfully slow. The 4GB Crucial Gizmo USB stick used for ReadyBoost in Vista seems fried as it wouldn't work in Linux or another PC.

Then I booted in to Vista again. This time all the USB devices seemed present, but Vista wanted to reinstall all the drivers (including for the USB mouse!)

File copying using the USB network adaptor was about twice as fast in Vista as in Linux!

I tried another cable in the on-board NIC again, and this time it worked. It worked for about 4 hours while I copied some Music and Video on to network and then stopped again while I was doing some web browsing. I noticed that I was getting floods of entries in the Windows Event Log (Windows Logs > System):

Driver has encountered an internal error
 System 

  - Provider 

   [ Name]  yukonwlh 
 
  - EventID 101 

   [ Qualifiers]  57351 
 
   Level 2 
 
   Task 0 
 
   Keywords 0x80000000000000 
 
  - TimeCreated 

   [ SystemTime]  2007-12-31T22:01:22.543Z 
 
   EventRecordID 384354 
 
   Channel System 
 
   Computer oval 

To avoid that I disabled the NIC in the Device Manager. Then I tried to reenable it, but after a pause the device just completely disappeared from Device Manager!

I have a PCI Express network card on order as well a new PC. If it starts to play up again it can go back to Germany for some surgery ...

Labels: hush, knoppix

// posted by Steven @ 10:05 PM 2 comments

I'm always on the look out for gadgets that will help me justify to myself the time it took to pull Cat5e cable under my floor boards. These might help as it seems that Cat5e is good for more than just Ethernet data:

All sorts of AV over Cat5 gadgets that use the cable like an enourmous SCART lead.

TV aerial RF over Cat5e: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, and Spec Sheet.

Video over Cat5e hub, and one with a price on. (A full setup is very expensive!)

Some things just go too far though.

// posted by Steven @ 4:36 PM 0 comments