BGL

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 02:36:18PM +0100, Robert Slade wrote:

> I did post several mails to the list and did not get any replies.

That often indicates something was wrong with your emails, e.g. you
didn't give enough information, and no-one was motivated to dig it out
of you.

> The machine is back in storage at present as I could not afford to spend
> any more time on it.
> 
> The details as far as I can remember without getting it out are:
> 
> Proliant 5000 server fitted with quad Xenon 200Mhz processors and 1Gbyte
> of memory with a raid controller and 5 9.1 Scsi drives. 

This is pretty old hardware, so it could have e.g. non-conformance to
some of the MP standards FreeBSD uses, a buggy BIOS (e.g. broken ACPI
support), failing power supply unable to keep up with high loads, etc.
All of these are *real possibilities* that have been observed many
times to be the cause of problems users alleged to be FreeBSD bugs.

> To try and isolate the problem I removed all the drives and put a spare
> 9.1 drive in. As far as applications went I was using DHCP and a DNS
> plus xwindows/kde with vncserver on a small test network consisting of a
> router and a windows xp pro machine running putty and tightvnc to
> connect.

It's not clear what you actually did here to try and test.  Note that
"removing all the drives" may have removed the source of the problem,
if your power supply was overloaded.

> I tried 5.4 stable 1st. With the standard kernel ie without any changes
> from the generic it worked fine - running for over 48 hours. Using the
> SMP kernel ie using the smp config with no other changes, I got random
> reboots after between 1/2 hr and 6 hrs.

Random reboots are very rare in FreeBSD and usually signify failing
hardware - I explained this in another post yesterday.  More likely is
that your system is panicking but you can't see it because you're in
X.  Follow the advice I gave yesterday to try and proceed further.

Good luck,
Kris
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