Launchpad insanity runs rampant

[Nils Kassube]

gene heskett wrote:
> My cnc milling machine out in the shop in the back yard, keeps
> throwing ntp errors at about the same rate Orville Redenbacher pops
> corn.  But no errors are in dmesg or /var/log/messages, they are
> purely a figment of the package tools imagination gone wild.
> 
> One of the utilities put an icon up that said I had a crash, which
> was news to me since the machine was still working very nicely.
> 
> This ntp error has been bugging me for about 6 months on a 32 bit
> ubuntu 10.04 LTS install on a Mach Speed Mobo carrying 2GB and an
> Xp1400 athlon processor.

This is only a wild guess, but I suppose there are some files in 
/var/crash as the result of a previous ntpd crash from about the time 
when the error report started to show up. If you don't intend to report 
that error, you could remove the files.

> But to report the error, I have to create an account on launchpad,
> which I attempted to do, but when it said a confirming email had
> been sent, that meant I had to come to the house since this is the
> only machine on my local net that collects the email.
> 
> Eventually, say about 15 minutes, the email showed up, and I made 2
> passes at giving it a password, a very long one but it has no caps
> or numbers in it, so I used another shorter one I might stand a
> snowballs chance in hell of remembering this time tomorrow.
> 
> It bought that, but then bounced me because I wasn't (I presume) on
> the same machine that I initiated the account request from.  And a
> repeat click on the message got me bounced again like a white
> mouthed mule.  Mind you this whole home network is behind a dd-wrt
> install with just one IP address.

Launchpad doesn't care about the machine you are using. Could it be that 
you had your caps-lock key activated (either when you created the 
password or when you tried to use it)?

> There is no error, but any time the updater software even checks for
> updates, I have another popup that takes manual closing by grabbing
> focus & refusing to allow a click away, advising me that ntp is
> miss-behaving.

Can you tell us what _exactly_ the error message is? Maybe that helps to 
find out the real reason for the popup.

> If that pops up on top of the emc control screen,
> stealing the focus so I have to clear it before I can even hit the
> emergency stop and save a $500 part from being trashed, I am going
> to be more than this amount of upset.

IMHO the emergency stop should be a real switch, not a button on the 
screen. I would never rely on the software to work correctly in case of 
an emergency. But of course it is your machine and you probably know 
what you are doing.

Furthermore I would suggest that you disable automatic updates so you 
can manually start updates when your machine isn't running and popups 
can't cause damage.


Nils