Re: inserting USB key causes reboot (sometimes)

[Rob Owens <rowens@ptd.net>]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 11:21:19AM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> On Saturday 16 January 2010 19:45:14 Rob Owens wrote:
> > I need help diagnosing a problem.  I have a Lenny system that sometimes
> > reboots when I insert a USB key.  It happens with multiple USB keys, but
> > I can't figure out the pattern as to when it reboots and when it
> > doesn't.
> 
> While my current system does not have this problem, my older system would 
> occasionally reboot when something was plugged in.
> 
> It's probably a problem with the port(s).  When something is plugged in, it 
> starts supplying USB power, this causes a voltage drop, some capacitor empties 
> and the system shuts down.  It's like an (extremely) localized brownout.
> 
> Still, the symptoms you describe could be caused by virtually anything in the 
> chain from device to kernel.  Since you can't seem to isolate it to a certain 
> device, I would suggest that the next troubleshooting steps would be to try to 
> isolated it to a port or kernel.
> 
> So, you might try to get the symptoms to show on Debian/kFreeBSD and make sure 
> you can get the symptoms to show on every port.

Thanks for the insight.  The machine in question is at a customer's
site, so I'll have him try different ports for now.  Hopefully I can
avoid taking a trip to his site...

-Rob