Re:I fixed a server with a precisely placed piece of tape
by nikau on Monday April 24, 2023 @10:32PM
(#35695914)
I did a similar thing in the 90s with a big box of faulty ethernet cards - they caused Windows 95 to lock up and the vendor had shipped us replacements telling us to throw out the old ones.
I was curious and put a card into a Linux box which started throwing a bunch of kernel messages about spurious interrupts but the network card worked OK.
Turns out they to they had a bug with the IRQ setting (they were one of the more expensive cards to be configured via a DOS utility instead of jumpers) and would send an interrupt on every IRQ pin regardless of the setting.
In the end I used a bench drill to break the trace for all IRQ lines except IRQ 10 and gave them away to friends.
I was curious and put a card into a Linux box which started throwing a bunch of kernel messages about spurious interrupts but the network card worked OK.
Turns out they to they had a bug with the IRQ setting (they were one of the more expensive cards to be configured via a DOS utility instead of jumpers) and would send an interrupt on every IRQ pin regardless of the setting.
In the end I used a bench drill to break the trace for all IRQ lines except IRQ 10 and gave them away to friends.