HP ProLiant DL360G3 rebuttal... ;-)

[Cagle, John (ISS-Houston)]

The HP ProLiant DL360G3 that Holger mentions below has hardware fan
control enabled by default.  With the latest BIOS version (and without
running a health driver), the hardware will start the fans at low speed
and will switch them to high speed when a certain temperature (e.g.
"temp-caution") is reached.  The fans will then run at full speed until
the server is rebooted.  If the temperature reaches an even higher trip
point (e.g. "temp-deadly") the server will automatically power off
(without a graceful shutdown).

There's no reason to use an older BIOS version.  The latest version will
start the fans at a low speed instead of starting them at a high speed.
Thus, if operating in a cool environment, you'll have less noise.

FWIW, some of the benefits of running a health driver (on a supported
OS) are:

- fans will gradually ramp up in speed instead of going directly from
slow to fast.
- a graceful OS shutdown can occur instead of the abrupt power off when
the system overheats.

Regards,
John
--------------------------------
John Cagle     john.cagle at hp.com
Principal Member Technical Staff
   Industry Standard Servers
    Hewlett-Packard Company

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Holger Kipp [mailto:Holger.Kipp at alogis.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2003 11:39 AM
> To: david at landgren.net; freebsd-current at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Options available for using >4Gb RAM on x86
> 
> David Landgren (david at landgren.net) wrote: 
> 
> >I'm looking at replacing my Squid proxy hardware in the next 
> month or 
> >two. I'll be deploying a single processor (+HTT) HP DL-380 
> G3 with 6Gb 
> >RAM and two RAID 1 volumes.
> 
> I can't comment on 5.x, but I experienced some problems with 
> the latest HP DL360G3, as the bios was changed lately to 
> reduce fan noises, and then a OS-dependant health driver 
> might be needed. Otherwise, the system will overheat and 
> switch off without warning.
>   A possible solution might be to reactivate fan hardware 
> control (iirc there are some hardware switches) and/or go 
> back to an older Firmware. For the DL 360 G3 we used 
> SP23587.exe (ProLiant DL360 G3 ROM P31 (01/09/2003)) which 
> worked. And don't forget to complain to HP ;-)
> 
> >This uses (at least in 4.x) the bge network driver and the ciss SCSI 
> >driver. Is this even reasonable to consider right now or are 
> they known 
> >to be completely untested?
> 
> Regards,
> Holger Kipp