Letting Problems Fester
Resolving problems is satisfying. Until resolved the problem can be frustrating and annoying.
Often though the root cause is not obvious. I have learned not to let that defeat me. The human subconscious has a unique and wonderful way of festering problems and then bubbling out a solution.
At work there is one workstation I use when I am at the office. The workstation runs Debian 10 with the MATE and Xfce desktop environments.
One day the workstation stopped recognizing the Linux partition on my USB stick. I use that stick and partition to store files when I travel between home and the office. Curiously, the workstation recognized the NTFS partition on the USB stick.
The first time the workstation failed to recognize the partition I was near the end of my work session. I did not resolve the problem. I added an item to my to do list.
A few weeks passed. I again found myself at the workstation. Despite the line item in the to do list I had nominally forgotten the USB stick problem — until I inserted the stick.
The stick worked fine at home. This time I was determined to resolve the problem.
I logged in under another account. The partition was not recognized. I inserted the stick in another computer. No problems. That indicated the problem was unique to the workstation,
I walked through the steps of manually creating a mount point and mounting the partition. No problems.
For a few long moments I stared at the screen. I sensed I was overlooking something obvious.
Like Arnold Horshack my subconscious yelled for attention. The proverbial light bulb in my mind grew brighter. I smiled when I suspected the root cause.
At one time Ubuntu MATE 16.04 was installed on this workstation. After migrating to Debian 10, on the Linux workstations I left the Ubuntu hard disk installed. This was a simple conservative move. Should some corner case event occur after the migration users could boot into Ubuntu and try to learn the difference.
After a few months with this configuration I decided that corner case issues would be unlikely. I secure wiped and removed the disk from the workstation.
I wasn’t paying attention but this is when the workstation stopped recognizing my USB stick.
While the two hard disks coexisted I did not want the desktop file managers populating the Places sidebar with the Ubuntu disk partitions. Unnecessary noise. I created a udev /etc/udev/rules.d/99-hide-partition.rules rule set to hide the Ubuntu disk partitions.
KERNEL=="sdb2", ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"
KERNEL=="sdb3", ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"
KERNEL=="sdb4", ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"
Before I removed the Ubuntu hard disk my USB stick was recognized as /dev/sdc. After removing the hard disk the USB stick was recognized as /dev/sdb.
The udev rules kept my USB Linux partition, /dev/sdb2 hidden. The NTFS partition is /dev/sdb1, but the udev rules did not hide that partition.
Deleting the no longer needed rule set resolved the problem.
This is an example of how simple changes in a computer can actually be quite complex. Also how our subconscious mind can be a benefactor.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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