On Apr 19, 2007, at 3:54 AM, Dimitris Zilaskos wrote:
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.
I've got a large number of Dell PowerEdge 1750, 1850, 2900, 2950
deployed in various production environments, whereas some other
clients are using HP ProLiant 360/370 boxen. Both seem to be rock
solid under either 5.4/5.5, or 6.1/6.2. I've even got a pair of
firewall boxes running nothing but NAT and SSHd, which are at 600+
days of uptime:
FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE (FW) #0: Tue Jul 12 11:10:14 EDT 2005
Welcome to FreeBSD!
12:24PM up 636 days, 19:26, 3 users, load averages: 0.25, 0.14, 0.04
(Machines running more services get OS or service related updates
more frequently-- typically every month to every 3 months-- but I
don't like to make changes to a running machine unless I expect the
change to make an improvement which justifies the disruption. For a
non-SMP firewall which would involve loss of external network
connectivity to update, nothing in 6.x is worth the cost to update to
as yet, IMHO.)
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.
Sounds to be something hardware-related like a power-supply problem,
if the failure rate is gradually getting shorter and is not
correlated with load at all.
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.
Hmm. Well, you might have to wait for a few weeks or months to be
able to get reasonable comparison of longer-term stability, but this
at least implies that something like cooling or a failed fan aren't
likely causes.
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.
Try to get a crash dump. Also, you might find reviewing the BIOS
options and disabling everything which is not needed, hopefully
including USB, will help.
--
-Chuck
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
