John's Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

I took notes as I troubleshot, here’s what I have to work with the next time. Cheers.