aic7896 SCB timeout - is this a sign of impending doom?

[Scott Mitchell]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 03:39:40PM -0700, Doug White wrote:
> As mentioned, SCSI timeouts can have multiple causes, most of them not
> good.  The thing to watch for is which target the command timed out on.
> Command timeouts can come from:
> 
> . Bad cabling or termination
> . Bad cabling or termination
> . Bad cabling or termination (it needs to be said three times)
> . Flakey/failing device
> 
> If it continues to happen then you should take a look around.  Temperature
> wouldn't be a bad thing to check anyway.

Hi Doug,

The drives are housed in a hot-swap cage in an Intel server case, so cabling
or termination problems would be quite serious... there's only one cable and
that's hardwired in.  The drives are ~3 years old so it would not surprise
me if one was on the way out.  Might be time to investigate the SMART
monitoring tools that were mentioned on here a week or so ago.

Temperature shouldn't be a problem given the number of fans in the case,
but I'll check that they're all still running OK.  This particular box is
at the bottom of a rack in a room with a ridiculous oversupply of underfloor
aircon - overheating has never been a problem here :-)

Anyway, I'll keep an eye on it and hope it doesn't happen again.
 
> Good boards. I'm using them as my build farm right now.  600MHz procs
> aren't that fast anymore but its a solid machine.

Agreed, they're excellent machines.  We use t pair of them as file / cvs /
DNS / NIS / www / etc. servers, which they're more than adequate for.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

	Scott

-- 
===========================================================================
Scott Mitchell           | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels
Cambridge, England       | 0x54B171B9 |  don't get sucked into jet engines"
scott at fishballoon.org | 0xAA775B8B |      -- Anon