rebooting and crashes on dell server

[Greg Barniskis]

BSD Guy wrote:
> Theres alot to this problem, but I'll try to be
> concise so I don't loose people.  I started out with a
> cheap dell server running scsi raid and 5.x  It
> crashed or locked up with a kernel panic in a
> different process (everything, syslog, you name it)
> ever few days.  I swapped ram around figuring it was
> at fault since it was bought used on ebay.  Still no
> luck.
> 
> Tired of messing with it, I bought a new dell
> poweredge 2650, with scsi raid, a couple gigs of ram,
> duals, and just a new system, configured it, copied
> user data over and switched to it.  Sure enough still
> the worst stability I've ever seen.  It has dual power
> supplies, each in a different UPS. I don't believe
> power is the problem or I'd see similar problems on
> the other server or router I have plugged in there.  I
> even upgraded to 6.0-Release-p1 but no luck.  
> 
> It panics from time to time, but usually now it just
> randomly reboots.  Often at least every 36 hours. 
> Often 2-3 times a few minutes apart when it does.  I
> did install a debug kernel 2 weeks ago to try to get a
> crash dump, but no panic's since then.

[snip]

Been running FreeBSD on Dell 2650's for a long, long time now and 
never had a single hardware issue that was specific to FreeBSD. 
Early firmware versions for this model had issues, but you say yours 
is brand new...

Got a DRAC card? Tried disabling it? We don't use them here but I 
have noticed frequent list chatter about how to use these with 
FreeBSD (and how not to have problems with them). See the archives.

I definitely agree with the suggestion to pound on the system with 
Dell's native diagnostics software; this'll be among the first 
things you're asked to do if you call them for support. If you've 
blown away their diagnostics partition, you should still be able to 
go to support.dell.com and download a bootable ISO of them. Barring 
that, a plain old http://www.memtest86.com/ test may help.


-- 
Greg Barniskis, Computer Systems Integrator
South Central Library System (SCLS)
Library Interchange Network (LINK)
<gregb at scls.lib.wi.us>, (608) 266-6348