Anthony's drive issues.Re: ssh password delay

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Mar 22, 2005, at 1:14 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

> owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:
>> Anthony -
>>
>>  	I'm curious - with the issues you are having with the drives (SCSI
>> I think you mentioned) have you considered these ideas?
>>
>> 1. Upgrade the system BIOS
>> 2. Upgrade the firmware in the SCSI controller
>> 3. Upgrade the firmware in the array (if applicable)
>>
>> Ther may be a bug-a-boo in one of those. If you have not - consider
>> doing so and see if this "may" correct your issues.
>>
>
> Racer,
>
>   Anthony has an on-motherboard Adaptec chip in an 8 year old Vectra.
> It does not use firmware.  It might be possible that he has a flashable
> motherboard BIOS but that BIOS isn't going to have microcode for the
> Adaptec controller in it.  (And in any case if he's never flashed his
> BIOS I would -strongly- recommend he don't do it now, since his eeprom
> has probably had the existing BIOS code burned into it by so long 
> without
> an update)  He is stuck with the ROM that is burned into
> the Adaptec controller by the manufacturer.  And I wouldn't put it past
> HP to have tampered with the Adaptec microcode anyway.  Compaq 
> definitely
> did with Adaptec controllers they put into their machines that were
> made during the same era.
<rest of advice trimmed>

Well...I apologize for the firmware statement I just made after seeing 
this.  I've seen so many "upgrade your firmware!" "Why should I, it 
worked before..." statements that...well...y'know.

Nice summary if this is what has been going on, Ted.  I remember having 
a system that ran "fine" under NT and under Linux liked spewing SCSI 
errors and resetting the bus.  Found out the drive was failing.  A 
search for the error gave me one link that stated that NT doesn't 
report the error, whereas Linux's driver spews them to the console 
(this was a few years ago).  From the sounds of it, I had a failing 
drive that Linux reported while NT would have run until the drive just 
gacked itself unexpectedly...