[PLUG] Linux workstation - strange behavior... VERY strange

["Eric at Lucii.org" <eric@lucii.org>]

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My Ubuntu 10.04 workstation suddenly started running very slow this afternoon.
The mouse cursor was "blinking" rapidly as if something was continuously
interrupting it.  When I started mousing around things went from bad to worse.
When a terminal received the focus, it displayed a continuous series of ~
characters at about the same rate as the keyboard repeat rate.   When Chromium
got the focus it started opening web developer windows... LOTS of web developer
windows ( ctrl-shift-I )

Any keyboard input appeared to be received but did not stop opening those
windows.  For example ctrl-U cleared the terminal input but the ~'s just
restarted after a brief pause.

I unplugged the keyboard and mouse from the KVM and then unplugged the KVM from
the system.  No change.

I tried ctrl-alt-backspace (per last week's discussion) and it does NOT WORK in
Ubuntu.  Surprise to me.

Eventually the window manager crashed and, sigh, I just pressed reset.  Or it
pressed reset.  Not sure which.

When it rebooted I got to the Ubuntu purple splash screen which was alternately
interrupted with a stream of console messages that flashed/scrolled by rapidly.
 (lots of blinking, scrolling, and flashing.) It seemed the words Blackberry and
udev were in there.

I rebooted again and added the instruction "Single" to the kernel line in grub
in an attempt to get into single user mode.  It responded by booting normally...
not what I expected.

In /var/log/syslog I found these two lines repeatedly:

Aug 30 14:37:05 ursa udevd[399]: BUS= will be removed in a future udev version,
please use SUBSYSTEM= to match the event device, or SUBSYSTEMS= to match a
parent device, in /etc/udev/rules.d/10-bla
ckberry.rules:21

Aug 30 14:37:05 ursa udevd[399]: SYSFS{}= will be removed in a future udev
version, please use ATTR{}= to match the event device, or ATTRS{}= to match a
parent device, in /etc/udev/rules.d/10-black
berry.rules:21

Since I don't connect my blackberry to the workstation I commented out the
contents of the file /etc/udev/rules.d/10-blackberry.rules.

After a reboot everything seems to work normally.

I'm trying to figure out what happened!  Any ideas?

Eric
- -- 
#  Eric Lucas
#
#                "Oh, I have slipped the surly bond of earth
#                 And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings...
#                                        -- John Gillespie Magee Jr
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