Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)
We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.
We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block
I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.
We had a laptop with a dead monitor that would mysteriously work at times. It turns out that most of the time, it was sitting on another laptop (of the same type). Those laptops had a magnet latch to hold them shut. It turns out that said magnet also was used as part of a “laptop closed” sensor that would disable the monitor, and the bottom laptop would trigger the sensor in the top one.
I’ve had a couple of issues like this:
Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)
We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.
We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block
I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.
We had a laptop with a dead monitor that would mysteriously work at times. It turns out that most of the time, it was sitting on another laptop (of the same type). Those laptops had a magnet latch to hold them shut. It turns out that said magnet also was used as part of a “laptop closed” sensor that would disable the monitor, and the bottom laptop would trigger the sensor in the top one.
Good news, they’re making it easier to fix stuff like “spurious double clicks”.
https://who-t.blogspot.com/2025/05/libinput-and-lua-plugins.html