[PLUG] flickering monitor advice?

[Brent Rieck]

On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 19:12, Kyle Accardi wrote:
> If the flickering CRT is intermittent, a ground loop seems less likely.
> If the flickering is constant, then perhaps a ground loop.

It is intermittent, I determined that it is in fact caused by the coffee
pot from some more testing today.

> What was it that told you not to plug all PCs into the same UPS?  Were you 
> tripping a breaker?

I was exceeding the UPS capacity somewhat it seemed - a few months ago
some construction was being done on another apartment and whenever the
cabinet maker's compressor kicked on it would cause all the lights to
turn OFF for a perceptible fraction of a second.  During that time the
UPS could never compensate for the power loss and I'd find myself
looking at reboot screens; moving a few power cords around on my other
USPes solved the problem.

> The KVM switch will bond all the chassis' together through the shield of the 
> cables.  Maybe you have one machine with a hot chassis?

I've seen what I think is this before and noticed a "tingle" when
touching an improperly wired appliance, but none of my computers seem to
have that issue.

> You mentioned that one of the outlets is ungrounded.  It'd be nice to fix 
> that: the simple way would be cut power to the outlet, remove it and see if 
> there are three wires coming into the box.  If so, replace the outlet with a 
> grounded one.  If not, you need to run a ground from the breaker panel.

I've had it open before when I added an outlet to the opposite side of
the wall it's on and it doesn't contain a grounded wire :(  Adding one
would be considerable effort I'd guess unless it was put on the outside
of the building; the breaker box is 2 floors down through finished
spaces (one of which is quite nice), going through walls with an
amazingly byzantine wiring and gas/hot water heat piping network inside
of them.  I'd like to wire it on the outside of the building, and
actually run a whole new circuit so I wouldn't share that circuit with 3
other apartments, but the breaker panel is completely full.

> To keep all this on-topic, chant "linux is as linux does" for the duration 
> of your troubleshooting endeavor.

Does it help that 2 of the computers and a laptop are running linux?

thanks again,
Brent