random hangs/reboots with Dell servers

[Dimitris Zilaskos]

 	Thnx to everyone for your replies,

A colleague has provided me with his hand notes of an older crash screen, 
it has the following(however i cant guarantee it is accurate, it is 
handnotes).

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
cpuid=0; apicid=00
fault virtual address=0xac
fault code=supervisor write,page not present
instruction pointer=0x20:0x
current process 79962
trap numbers : 12
panic: pagefault
cpuid=1
uptime=6d7423m55


 	I do not believe the problems are related to envriroment or 
electricity, since during the period the problems occured we have switched  data center, 
and in addition to dell systems there are 150 more nodes from various 
vendors (HP mostly, but also IBM, supermicro, SUN, and various assembled 
towers), and none has shown similar behaviour. We dont run FreeBSD on them 
though. We have a Dell 2850 with Windows 2003 that has been running rock 
solid for at least 1 year. And the 1750 that under FreeBSD 5 would 
sometimes crash even under no load, with RHEL 4 pushes 60 Mbps of ftp data 
24/7 with ease for the last year without any problems.

 	Disabling everything from BIOS was one of our first moves, though 
we havent disabled usb since sometimes we need to connect a keyboard. And 
no IPMI is running on a public interface:)

 	Apart from all the nodes being SMP and Dell, I cannot think of 
anything else in common. Some are SCSI, some are SATA. All have a number 
of jails. Memory size is 2 GB (the 1750), the others have 4 GB.

 	I have also asked Dell for some help, though they told me freebsd 
is not certified by Dell, they will try to look into it.


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Dimitris Zilaskos

Department of Physics @ Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , Greece
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