Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Apr 3 (Wed) – Update
The last few days have been boring. Mostly.
It rained off and on yesterday morning, at times it would really come down. Just after noon while I was driving home from coffee the fat raindrops banging into the windshield had a slightly ‘chunky’ appearance. Ah, some frozen bits inside those raindrops.
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15 minutes later as I was pulling into the garage it was snowing nicely. The rest of the day it snowed off and on, at times it would really come down. At around 5:30 pm the power went out. No lightning, slightly breezy. Why? Unexpected. I was in the middle of a project on the computer and expected to lose some of my work. First world problems.
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My phone said 5,700 people were without power in a town the size of Lynn. Maybe somebody knocked a pole over and it cascaded. This morning I learned that the electric company shut the power off because they had to. A fire had broken out inside an electrical vault beneath Main Street downtown so they had to cut the power to deal with that. Power came back on around a half hour later.
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When I fired up my computer I found out that Bluetooth wasn’t working. I use that to link to my headphones. So I had to fix that. Bluetooth can be tricky to troubleshoot on any system.
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The internet has tons of suggestions on how to troubleshoot and repair Bluetooth. Many propose or even recommend nuking stuff from orbit willy-nilly. Try this. Try that. That’s not how I roll. I took my time diagnosing. I ended up using a bunch of utilities to peer into different parts of the sausage factory. Some of them I had never heard of before. Here’s the tools I used to look around:
- systemctl
- lscpi
- bluetoothctl
- rfkill
- ps
- btmgmt
- hciconfig
- dmesg
- lsmod
That’s a lot. Everything I looked at looked good. After an hour or so I wound up staring at the kernel. I had hit bedrock. Sprinkled around the kernel were dozens of very small modules. On-line said there should be seven modules for Bluetooth. My kernel had six.
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It took me five seconds to load the missing module. No improvement. I then took the recommended approach of removing and loading the other six modules one by one in no particular order. The kernel wouldn’t let me uninstall the first five I tried, it kinda barked at me “I’m using that module” or something like that, including the word “FATAL” in uppercase. I’m not touching those. The kernel wasn’t using the sixth module so I removed it and loaded it. Presto. Bluetooth worked.
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I took notes as I troubleshot, here’s what I have to work with the next time. Cheers.