It is unbelievable how things can go bad starting from a small number of problems. This afternoon, I was overwhelmed by several hurdles, but there were only two main root causes: keyboard instability and network bandwith issue.
Everything started with the delivery of my new AZIO keyboard and Razer Taipan mouse. Well, these are low-risk plug-in devices that won’t disturb my work too much, so let’s plug them in and see how that goes. The mouse worked fine. It seems sturdy and scroll wheel is working well, far better than this Microsoft Comfort mouse I used a while ago. Pointer moves smoothly and there are several extra buttons that could be useful. Sensitivity can be adjusted with the touch of a button, so it can be decreased for office work for the pointer to move at reasonable speed and increased in games like Fract where I had to move the mouse five meters away to manipulate some controls!
Keyboard, on the other hand, didn’t work too well. Keys are large and the LED backlight is very nice, but the keyboard has a tendency to skip keys when I type. It skips randomly, especially the e and the s. This is a real pain when trying to do anything other than looking at emails or analyzing code or data. I tried to give it some time, but the problem persisted, up to the point I got fed up and put back my old keyboard.
Some time after I put back the old keyboard, my NX connection to my company’s remote server dropped. I had to reconnect and then got the DPI bug again. The remote desktop was running in a low resolution as if DPI scaling wasn’t disabled for the NX client anymore. I tried to restart the client, checked the DPI setting, everything was fine. I had to reboot the whole system to get my resolution back at 1680×1050 in the remote desktop.
That worked for some time, then things became laggy. Ok, we need a plan B: a VirtualBox guest running Linux and accessing the files remotely using sshfs. I already had a VM on my home PC, so I wanted to copy it on my company’s ultrabook as a first step. That was intended to run in the background and not disturb anything, but file transfer became unstable and started to slow down and stop completely. I had to initiate file transfer from my home PC: it wouldn’t work the other way round, again because of Windows. File transfer from Ubuntu failed, because the VirtualBox image was on my Windows partition and Ubuntu refused to mount it because now, Windows 8 doesn’t unmount partitions correctly, so NTFS-3G will eventuall have to adapt and implement very patchy and ugly workaround against this!
That forced me to switch back and forth between the two PCs and I was having trouble finding the buttons to switch the KVM and the HDMI switch. I don’t have a large enough desk to put two displays, two keyboards and mice so I am stuck with that stupid KVM and HDMI switch.
Things came to a total dead end when the network connection of the ultrabook stopped completely. Windows was unable to interact with my router and thus connect to the Internet. All I could do is turn wi-fi back on. I turned it off this morning, because Windows was stubbornly trying to use wi-fi instead of wired Ethernet! It took a while for wi-fi to come up, it didn’t connect automatically to my router, it took a while to connect, and connection was limited.
If I remember well, I could connect back to my NX server, but everything hung up and I had to terminate the NX client. Nothing would work: no ALT-F4, no right-click+Close program, I had to use the task manager. Then any attempt to connect back to the server returned to hung up NX session. I would have had to find back a long and complicated command on company’s wiki to reset the X server. No way! Tired of all this, I rebooted the whole server instead.
I ended up copying my files locally to not use the remote server at all and transfer the VirtualBox image using an external hard drive. That counter-productive end of afternoon totally drained me out and I was quite exasperated and overwheled after that. I have been fighting for weeks against the NX Client and the grid infrastructure I was connecting to, without nothing other than patchy workarounds that sometimes apply, sometimes fail. I felt I reached the dead end at this point. I needed a solution.
But that was working fine during the morning. Why, all of a sudden, things went south? All started from network issues: the ultrabook preferred wi-fi over wired Ethernet, the network connection to my NX server dropped all of a sudden, file transfer was unstable, Windows couldn’t access the network anymore, etc. So let’s act on network first, before fixing NX client again! Maybe that USB network interface is flawky and I would have to try with a new one.
But first, let’s remove it from that USB hub and plug it in directly into the ultrabook. That hub worked for a while, when I was using network just for sparse file transfers, but higher bandwith is needed for a full remote desktop connection. It is still good for keyboard and mouse, and necessary since that ultrabook has just two USB ports!
So I tried this, and that seemed to help! Connection to wired Ethernet happened almost instantly, Windows didn’t fall back to wi-fi as this morning, and I worked for half an hour, remotely connected, without any issue. As a final test, I transferred an Ubuntu ISO over the network and that worked without a flaw.
That hub is capable of transferring only a theoretic 480Mbts/s. It is used to carry over information from small devices like keyboards, mice, occasional data transfer from USB stick or external hard drive, but how about something requesting 100Mbits/s constantly? That may well overload the poor little hub.
If that still bugs, I will give a shot to the Gigabit Ethernet adapter I have in the office. If that one fails as well, I will probably have to give up on this utrabook and start carrying over the heavier laptop from office to home.