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2006.09.02

Hardware and Software Debugging

Debuggging day. The MySQL 5.0 server I tried to run as part of a MediaWiki installation under FreeBSD, crashed during initialization, and a Tomy Walkabout digital baby monitor started emitting a low beeping sound. I solved both cases through educated guesses.

The most tricky problem was the mySQL server crash. The server starts up through two layers of shell scripts, so I first had to untangle those by running them through sh -x. After I found how the actual server binary got executed I could probe it with strace, to see whether it was correctly reading its configuration files. (The FreeBSD port installation I used did not install a configuration file, so I installed one by hand.

cp work/mysql-5.0.24/support-files/my-medium.cnf /var/db/mysql/my.cnf
Consequently, I wasn't sure the server was reading it.) This guess didn't lead me anywhere, so I changed the port's Makefile to compile with debug information (pass --with-debug to config), and run the code under gdb. A stack trace at the point of crash showed me a fairly innocuous line in C++. Given that C++ can sometimes be tricky to compile correctly, I guessed that the problem was a bug in the fairly old (2.95.4) gcc installation on the FreeBSD 4.11 system where MySQL got compiled. I reinstalled the server from a precompiled binary (pkg_add -r mysql50-server), and everything worked fine.

The baby monitor case was more tricky, mainly because I lacked proper diagnostic tools. An interesting symptom was that the beeping sound stopped once I put entirely fresh batteries in the transmitting unit. After verifying with a multimeter the voltage output of the power brick, I decided to try a bold move. I opened the transmitting unit, and replaced the 100μF electrolytic capacitor that was near the power supply cables with a new one. My hypothesis was that the capacitor was leaky and failed to filter the power supply voltage. Indeed, the unit worked flawlessly after the change. A lucky educated guess.

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Creative Commons License Last modified: Saturday, September 2, 2006 11:47 pm
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.