keyboard dies at login screen

[Brian Jones]

Hi,

This is kinda kooky.  Wondering if anyone's seen this issue.

I have 3 PE2650's, all configured exactly the same from both a hardware 
and software standpoint.  They're all running from the same Redhat 7.3 
kickstart template, and when I configured the kernels, I did one, saved 
the config to a file, and used the file for the other kernels.  They're 
all running 2.4.20, by the way.

So two of the boxes come up spectacularly.  Yay me.  The third one 
*looks* like everything is going fine... the lights on the keyboard 
flash, and the keyboard is usable at the Grub boot screen (ie, I can 
select which kernel I wanna boot, etc).  It's also usable during the 
service startup (ie, during eth0 initialization, which always takes a 
few seconds, I can hit enter and stuff and see results).  However, as 
soon as the login prompt is displayed, the keyboard becomes unusable!

So I figured I'd run delldiag on the sucker, but the problem is, while 
I can get around in the early stages of loading modules in delldiag and 
all (ie, I can hit 'ok' when I load a new floppy), once I get to the 
menu where I'm supposed to tell delldiag what to do, I can't use the 
keyboard again!!  ACK!

I've tried all the usual troubleshooting stuff; using known good 
keyboards, plugging in the keyboard directly instead of going via the 
KVM switch, etc.  Trying a couple of different brand keyboards (one was 
a Dell) :-), making sure everything was connected properly, using both 
'Off' and 'On' settings in the BIOS for 'numlock', etc.  I can't think 
of what else I can do.  Redhat's logs contain nothing about the 
keyboard, and dmesg and everything else looks normal AFAIK.

Any clues here?
brian.