random hangs/reboots with Dell servers

[Dimitris Zilaskos]

 	Dear all,

I am trying to understand some long standing issues we have with freebsd 
and Dell servers.

Over the last 3 year we have installed freebsd 5.x and 6.x, with currently 
deployed version being 6.1, to a variety of of Dell rack mounted systems.

The Dell systems used so far are Poweredge 1750, 2950 (both scsi), and 
sc1425 (sata). All of them are dual CPU Xeon systems.

All these systems serve as mail/web servers, with 2 to 15 jails.

Installation has always proceeded normally without problems. However, 
after a few months of operation, all of these systems, purchased at 
different moments during the last 3 years, will begin rebooting randomly 
or freezing completely.

These reboots/freezes will at first occur once per 6 months, then 
gradually will move to to once per month, to normally stabilize around 
once per week, but in the case of the 1750 system once it even happened 
twice a day.

Load does not seem to matter, since even after shutting down all services 
in the servers, still random reboots occured.

So far we tried various tricks digged from the archives, like disabling 
ACPI, HT, but nothing changed.

We have migrated some systems that had these issues to RHEL compatible OS, 
and they run rock solid under heavy load.

Right now I have enabled kernel crash dumps and I am waiting for the next 
crash. But I understad a lot of people use FreeBSD with Dell servers, and 
I would like to listen on how to tackle this situation we are facing.

 	Best regards,

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Dimitris Zilaskos

Department of Physics @ Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , Greece
PGP key : http://tassadar.physics.auth.gr/~dzila/pgp_public_key.asc
 	  http://egnatia.ee.auth.gr/~dzila/pgp_public_key.asc
MD5sum  : de2bd8f73d545f0e4caf3096894ad83f  pgp_public_key.asc
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