Mouse stopped working.

Syth

My mouse has stopped responding. I was boardsing at about 12:0pm today. I logged out (of my PC). I had been running Folding@home on tty6. I decieded to let it run while I was at the cinema. When I came home the fan was annoying me, so I turned my PC off. A while later when I turned it back on and logged in, my mouse didn't make the mouse pointer move. It was completly unresponsive. I tried 2 other mice.

However the mouse works for a short while while the PC boots. Fedora Core 2 (that's what I'm running BTW) shows a graphical boot up splash screen. A progress bar will move to show how much of the system has loaded. When this screen is shown first, my mouse works perfectly. But once it gets to "setting the hostname", my mouse freezes. Completly unresponsive. /var/log/messages and dmesg don't show any kind of "Error mouse not found" stuff. I could post both if needed.

My Stats:
Fedora Core 2. Mouse don't work with the standard 2.6.5 kernel and the 2.6.8 kernel I got via up2date. The mouse is a PS/2 non-optical mosue that has been working perfectly for ages.

I have broadband and since I was running folding@home, I left it all connected for several hours, so it's possible that someone could have cracked my system, but why would someone mess with my mouse? How could I find out if someone did crack my system? I have the red hat firewall set at 'high'.

Any advice/tips/where to find out more?

Syth

Well when I botted up the old girl today everything seemed to be working. Mouse was fine. Weird. At least I don't have to use Links anymore. (ah blessed X, how I missed you.) Though it is very strange, as last night I must have rebooted about 5 times in various attempts to get it to work, so it's not really like the windows 'solution' of rebooting.

SkepticOne

Take advantage of the current working mouse to find out what driver module is being loaded for the mouse. Under root type 'lsmod'. You should see a listing of all the modules loaded with one obviously being the mouse (eg. psmouse).

When the problem happens again, switch to the console and do 'lsmod' again to see if the driver is being loaded.

If not loaded type 'modprobe <name of module>' and see what errors are reported. On my system these are displayed on the console, but on others they may be logged.

SkepticOne

Syth wrote:

I have broadband and since I was running folding@home, I left it all connected for several hours, so it's possible that someone could have cracked my system, but why would someone mess with my mouse? How could I find out if someone did crack my system? I have the red hat firewall set at 'high'.

If you can get malicious code into a module then you have unrestricted access to the entire system. For this reason, it is sometimes recommended that for maximum security you compile just what you require into the kernel itself rather than separate module files.

Tripwire can be set up so that it monitors modules and other files to see if they have been tampered with.

Syth

Huh. Weird. I tryed lsmod to see and this is my output.

Module                  Size  Used by
snd_mixer_oss          14017  2
snd_intel8x0           30829  4
snd_ac97_codec         58821  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_pcm                83529  2 snd_intel8x0
snd_timer              25413  1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc          8393  2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
gameport                4033  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_mpu401_uart         7361  1 snd_intel8x0
snd_rawmidi            21733  1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device          6473  1 snd_rawmidi
snd                    45477  11 snd_mixer_oss,snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
soundcore               7713  3 snd
iptable_nat            19049  1
parport_pc             21249  1
lp                      9133  0
parport                35977  2 parport_pc,lp
autofs4                20677  0
sunrpc                141861  1
tulip                  40929  0
ipt_REJECT              5057  1
ipt_state               1857  5
ip_conntrack           25569  2 iptable_nat,ipt_state
iptable_filter          2369  1
ip_tables              13889  4 iptable_nat,ipt_REJECT,ipt_state,iptable_filter
floppy                 54001  0
sg                     28513  0
sd_mod                 17473  0
sr_mod                 14309  0
dm_mod                 47317  0
usb_storage            58121  0
scsi_mod              105360  4 sg,sd_mod,sr_mod,usb_storage
ohci_hcd               19793  0
ehci_hcd               27973  0
button                  4825  0
battery                 7117  0
asus_acpi               9177  0
ac                      3533  0
md5                     3905  1
ipv6                  217349  8
ext3                   96937  2
jbd                    66521  1 ext3

Nothing that looks like a mouse driver. Yet my mouse is working perfectly now.

I haven't compiled this kernel (yet), it's a plain FC2 install and the new kernel I got via up2date (for the laugh).

SkepticOne

Syth wrote:

Huh. Weird. I tryed lsmod to see and this is my output.

Nothing that looks like a mouse driver. Yet my mouse is working perfectly now.

I haven't compiled this kernel (yet), it's a plain FC2 install and the new kernel I got via up2date (for the laugh).

Hmmm. It must be compiled into the kernel. Is there documentation detailing exactly what options were used in compiling the kernel?

Although for security it is sometimes suggested compiling necessary drivers directly into the kernel, for home use I prefer to compile drivers as modules as this allows for more interactive diagnostics. If you find, for example, an IRQ conflict, you can change unload the driver and reload it with different options as well as reading the diagnostic errors for that specific driver. If the problem reoccurs, you might consider this approach.