(Updated, 2020 Jun) Prevent Debian Linux randomly reboot on Biostar NM70I-847

Disclaimer: The article here is provided “as is” without any warranties. The article may not suit your situation. Use at your own risk.

I have a NM70I-847 motherboard, and I installed Debian 9 Stretch on it recently. After installation, the system began to reboot randomly without any warning.

I used to run Debian 7 Wheezy on this motherboard, the RC6 sleep feature of the CPU’s graphics need to be disabled to prevent such issue. It should be very easy to fix just need to add parameter “i915.i915_enable_rc6=0” to grub boot option.

But the method seems not working (or deprecated) — after applied the fix computer still keep rebooting on its own. Message like the following can be observed from dmesg:

i915: unknown parameter 'i915_enable_rc6' ignored

Yep, that’s why this fix is not working, because this parameter has been ignored by system. Continue reading (Updated, 2020 Jun) Prevent Debian Linux randomly reboot on Biostar NM70I-847

Wanna Cry?

Last weekend was definitely not a normal weekend. The flare out of the computer worm virus WannyCry[1] screwed lot of people’s weekend. It’s been quite long since last mass computer virus outbreak which I can remember was the Blast worm virus[2] back in 2003.

The virus takes advantage of the exploit MS17-010[3] in Windows’ SMB server, it use port 445 to get control of an unpatched computer, and then use this computer to infect more computers on the network. This time, the exploit affects almost every PC running Windows.

Especially for the PC still running outdated version like Windows XP which is widely used in my local banks, companies, stores, gov departments …, etc. Microsoft released a patch[4] for these end-of-life OSes on May 12th, which is very unusual. Continue reading Wanna Cry?

一例诡异的 USB 3.0 扩展卡和主板 USB 冲突的故障

主角：一块 2012 年买的主板 Biostar NM70I-847。(Intel NM70 芯片组集成 Celeron 847 CPU)

主板后部 2 组共 4 个 USB 2.0 插口。主板上有 2 组 USB 2.0 插针（F_USB1和2），那么这块主板一共可以支持 8 个 USB 2.0 插口。主板是 ITX 版型，所以只有一个 PCI-E 2.0 x16 插槽。我之前在 PCI-E 槽内安装了一块 USB 3.0 扩展卡，用以提供 USB 3.0 支持。

主板目前被用在 NAS 上，后面插了一个装了 SD 卡的读卡器用来安装 Linux 系统。因为不太喜欢主机后面凸出一段，所以我最近购了 9-pin 转 2 x USB 转接线，准备将读卡器挪到机箱内部。

屁颠屁颠的把转接线插到主板的 USB 插针上，接上读卡器，开机——侦测不到读卡器……我又接上键盘试了下，结果也一样。

因为以前用过该主板的 F_USB 所以我觉得主板上的插针应该没有问题，再三检查了 BIOS 设置后，也确认 USB 并没有被禁用。甚至我把 BIOS 设置都重置过了，还是这样。 Continue reading 一例诡异的 USB 3.0 扩展卡和主板 USB 冲突的故障