FreeBSD Crashes Intermittently !!

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Fri, March 11, 2016 9:52 am, lokadamus at gmx.de wrote:
> On 03/09/16 13:24, shahzaib shahzaib wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Supermicro X5690 (12 cores, 24 threads - 2u)
>> 96GB RAM
>> 12x3TB mirror+stripping (HBA-LSI9211)
>> X8DT3 Board
>>
>> We've total of 5 supermicro servers built upon same hardware and all of
>> them intermittently goes down and sometimes they crash and boot up
>> automatically (within 6min) and sometimes they gets freeze and we've to
>> manually boot them via IPMI interface. All the time we get 'MCA Internal
>> Timer Error' in crash logs. Here is the recent one :
>>
>> http://pastebin.com/042SJ11c
> Have you look for bios update?
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DT3.cfm
> Version R 2.1 is the last one.

In my humble opinion, the _need_ to install BIOS update is extremely bad
flag on hardware manufacturer reputation. For ages I used Tyan system
boards ("motherboard" jargon became the name for system board decades
ago...) and never I had a problem to solve which it was necessary to
install BIOS update. The requirement to install BIOS update is an
indication that whichever BIOS version needs to be replaced should never
have been released in the first place - not before is was debugged
appropriately. Tyan is in small server board business forever. A bit
younger Supermicro... well, I have a feeling that they indeed have flops
with some "releases" of their BIOSes. Alas, Supermicro effectively
displaced Tyan from US small server market. I had problems with some
Supermicro boards, most notably boards for AMD Opterons (which "die of
age" sometimes at rather young age: 4 -5 years or so, which I attributed
to not too good PCB and/or electronics design of the board...). The only
reasons for the need of newer BIOS I feel are justified are: enabling new
features of some motherboard components and security patch, the last
should be really rare in such small and simple programs as BIOSes.

Sorry about rant (probably should have added <rant> tags...)

Valeri

>
> dmesg and other logfiles show no errors?
> When all thinks working on Dell, then ok.
>
> Greetings.
>
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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