Ubuntu Linux laptop crashes near a certain welding supplier

Are they doing arc welding there? An arc welder must produce an awful lot of broadband noise which could be picked up by any trace in your laptop not just by the radio components.

Are you competing with yourself for most irrelevant posts?

My first reaction is that no, they sell welders but they do not weld regularly. Possible but unlikely.

Chicago).

hostile

Is there a microwave link somewhere in the area? Or a radar dish? The electronics on my Discovery were knocked out by a military radar.

AWEM

The overheat indicator light on my catalytic converter used to come on every time I drove past a certain radio station.

Geez Iggy, I thought you lived out in West Bumfunk. Why the heck are you driving all the way down here to get your bottles filled?

Paul K. Dickman

But worth checking -- also TIG. I got some warnings about TIG using high frequencies that will muck up electronics when I took welding (which seems a bit like an old wives tale, but I haven't really investigated).

A hostile WAP that crashes Linux is extremely unlikely.

So next time you go there, pull up a block or two away and turn WiFi

*OFF*. Make sure the laptop is in the same place in the truck and preferably with the same applications active and see if it crashes when you park in as near the same place outside the welding supplier as you did last time. If it hasn't crashed when you come back out, but crashes if you sit there and re-enable the WiFi it *might* be an odd WiFi signal, otherwise if it stays running the mystery interference has gone away or if its crashed when you came out its some sort of RFI screwing up some signal on the motherboard or drives.

Also take a medium wave portable radio. Tune it between stations and listen a block away and again when you get close.

If it *IS* RFI, *dont* leave your laptop switched on when you go there!

Hard to say, but they are in a populous area in Chicago, so anything very high power would not be likely found. Just speculating.

I TIG weld at home and it does not crash my laptop.

I do not necessarily mean by hostile to say "designed to crash Linux", maybe some buggy WAP that sends malformatted packets.

Yep, next time I will try more. I looked in /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages and did not find anything worth mentioning.

Iggy. Your problem is gremlins. While laptops are new fangled things that have been irritating us for a mere half generation now, gremlins have plagued mankind since at least the dark ages. V

So do I.

| >> Are they doing arc welding there? An arc welder must produce an awful lot | >> of broadband noise which could be picked up by any trace in your laptop | >> not just by the radio components. | >

| > My first reaction is that no, they sell welders but they do not weld | > regularly. Possible but unlikely. | | But worth checking -- also TIG. I got some warnings about TIG using | high frequencies that will muck up electronics when I took welding | (which seems a bit like an old wives tale, but I haven't really | investigated). | | A hostile WAP that crashes Linux is extremely unlikely.

Not a myth at all, at least in my experience. I had to replace a Napco alarm system because my TIG welder would drive it nuts every time I used it. I changed to shielded wire to my keypad, and all the sensors in the area of the TIG machine, but no help. Even tried grounding foil around the keypad, but no help. Finally just replace it with another brand, and problem solved.

Have not had a similar problem with any other electrical device.

I'm thinking there is some serious spurious emissions of RF in that area. Fwiw, I drive by a foundry and the electrical noise will over ride my fm wireless transmitter for my mp3 player, kick my cell phone off the network, and over load my ham radio. Nasty place.

Wes

I demand that Ignoramus2817 may or may not have written...

Kernel panic. You won't find anything in the log files *but* try switching to a text console (before it panics!) and you may see something useful. You'll want a high-res console, though (append "vga=ask" to the kernel command line if you get fewer than 50 lines of text).

We lost our 30 some year old microwave (finally) - wow programming on keys?! and we got a switcher. My wife or I can tote it anywhere. The old one took a strong one and wanting a cart...

The switcher from what I can determine is so bad that it kills the wireless internet connection - dead.

I have to bring in my scope to measure the wavelength and density.

I wonder if it even passed testing.

Mart> >

If its electrically noisy, WAP packets may well get corrupted.

Yes, but a *lot* of work has gone into making the Linux networking stack bulletproof (with a lot of publicity when something has gone wrong, like the Ping of Death a while ago). It isn't the WAP sending malformed packets I'm calling extremely unlikely, it's those malformed packets crashing the laptop.