Strange crashing/rebooting problem

[Alan Amesbury]

Taken from the digest form, so hopefully I won't whack the formatting
too badly.....

Dan Charrois <dan at syz.com> wrote:

[snip]

>No, I haven't been able to run diagnostics and rule out the hardware  
>for two reasons..  First, the server is located about an hour's drive  
>away, and I haven't had the chance to get to it yet.  Of course, this  
>can be fixed.  But secondly, I have no idea *how* to run Dell  
>Diagnostics.  The "Dell PowerEdge Service and Diagnostic Utilities,  
>Version 4.4" CD that I have insists on being run from Windows, right  
>down to a setup.exe in the root directory and a ReadMe that starts  
>describing how to use the CD as:
>  
>
[snip]

This is pretty much classic Dell.  We've purchased a number of systems
without operating systems on which we run FreeBSD.  However, they
continually operate under the assumption that we are running Windoze or
Linux, and expect those to do things like BIOS updates.  I'm trying to
work it out with them, but it's been pretty painful so far (enough that
I'm starting to look at other hardware vendors).  However, in the case
of the diagnostics utilities, Dell's a bit more enlightened.

These links

    ftp://ftp.dell.com/diags/ED5061A0.tar.gz
    ftp://ftp.dell.com/diags/EI5061A0.ZIP

    ftp://ftp.dell.com/diags/MP1038A0.tar.gz
    ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/diags/MP1038A0.zip


point at the Dell 32-bit diagnostics (first pair) and the memory
diagnostics utilities (second pair).  The .tar.gz files containg raw
floppy images suitable for writing to floppy with a command like

    cat file.img | dd of=/dev/fd0 obs=18k


or something like that.  The .ZIP files contain what appear to be ISO
images suitable for burning to a CD.  Figuring that command out is left
as an exercise for the reader.  :-)


--
Alan Amesbury
University of Minnesota