Re: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers
Philip Tait wrote: the supplied drives, and installed 4 Barracuda ES.2s. After doing a Clear Configuration in the pre-boot RAID setup utility, I can perform no operation with the drives - they are marked as blocked. Is Dell preventing the use of 3rd-party HDDs now? Thanks for any enlightenment. Hi Philip, I was wondering what the firmware version on the blocked drives is? e.g. using smartctl or hdparm -I on the drives when stuck in a different box? Assuming your drives are SATA rather than SAS, the firmware in a 250G Dell-supplied ES.2 in an R200 which I have here is MA08, whereas some third-party drives in other machines use SNxx series firmware. I believe it is possible to switch from one to the other firmware series. Whilst I think Dell's policy is probably wrong (it should be complain loudly rather than disallow), it's possible that there are genuine reasons for this - I spent/wasted most of last week diagnosing what is starting to look like a firmware bug on WD 2TB green power drives on a non-Dell server - interspersing SMART queries with other types of transactions would appear to occasionally cause the drives to lock-up! I wouldn't be surprised if the H700 adaptor firmwares are doing various unusual things to the hard drives, and it's possible that Dell has got nervous about buggy firmware from unqualified drives reflecting badly on their hardware. Some official (or non-official) comment from Dell on the *technical* reasons for this decision would be welcome Cheers, Tim. ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers
On 8 Feb 2010, at 11:48, Tim Small wrote: ... it's possible that there are genuine reasons for this - I spent/wasted most of last week diagnosing what is starting to look like a firmware bug on WD 2TB green power drives on a non-Dell server ... I wouldn't be surprised if the H700 adaptor firmwares are doing various unusual things to the hard drives, and it's possible that Dell has got nervous about buggy firmware from unqualified drives reflecting badly on their hardware. There's a thread on gentoo-user which I have just now seen come to conclusions regarding modern drives with 4K sector sizes (1-Terabyte drives - 4K sector sizes? - bar performance so far) It appears that AIUI fdisk will, by default, create partitions out of optimal alignment for these modern drives. My understanding of this is a little sketchy - I *think* I'm understanding correctly, but I beg forgiveness if I explain wrong. The first partition created by fdisk will, by default, start at sector 63, as shown by `echo p | sudo fdisk -u /dev/sdb`. Two users in that thread report that creating the partition manually to start at sector 64 will, on large modern drives with 4K sector sizes, increase performance by a couple of orders of magnitude, to roughly 20 seconds from 8-10 minutes. I believe cfdisk may also by default create its first partition beginning at sector 63, as I'm seeing that on one of my systems here and I tend to use cfdisk for partitioning. Apparently Windows, since Vista, at least, does not suffer this problem, and already aligns partitions optimally by default. So it would be quite cool if Dell's firmware specially compensated for this for the benefit of Linux users. If this were the reason (and actually I suspect that it is not) then the firmware should squawk about 3rd-party drives, rather than rejecting them outright, as already agreed by everyone posting to this thread. Stroller. ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: Dell OMSA 6.2 RHEL 5 64bit
On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 01:24:33PM -0600, Baird, Josh wrote: Unfortunately, ensure = latest got me too for OMSA. I had lots of problems, including a missing storage controller, and ended up downgrading back to 6.1 across the board. No problems with 6.1 for me. Dell - WHEN WILL THIS BE FIXED??? This has been a known issue for weeks now, with zero response from Dell. My 9G hardware is still under support. It is not unreasonable for me to expect you to fix. -- *** * John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ * * * *** ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
CPU Upgrade for Dell PowerEdge 1435SC
First of all, it would be a Good Thing if the mailing-list archives were made searchable; this might have obviated my posting this message. However, it's not (yet) so. We're wanting to upgrade our Dell PowerEdge 1435SC from a single AMD Opteron 2210 CPU to dual-CPUs, and faster ones, at that. Dell's marketing material states that the 1435SC can be populated with AMD 2200- and 2300-series CPUs (dual- and quad-core, respectively). But, once bitten, twice shy they say, so although I've searched for information regarding CPU compatibility with this one's motherboard (0CK703, version A01), I've been unlucky at finding anything. Does anyone have first-hand experience with such a CPU upgrade? Alternatively, can anyone point me in the direction of information regarding such a CPU upgrade? TIA! -- JONATHAN B. HOREN Systems Administrator UAF Life Science Informatics Center for Research Services jbho...@alaska.edu http://biotech.inbre.alaska.edu ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: CPU Upgrade for Dell PowerEdge 1435SC
On Mon, February 8, 2010 16:54, Jonathan B. Horen wrote: First of all, it would be a Good Thing if the mailing-list archives were made searchable; this might have obviated my posting this message. However, it's not (yet) so. Sure they are. http://tinyurl.com/yljevh2 ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
RE: R410 stops during boot waiting for a keypress of F1 or F2
Message: 1 Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 17:53:30 -0600 From: Rahul Nabar rpna...@gmail.com Subject: R410 stops during boot waiting for a keypress of F1 or F2 To: linux-powere...@lists.us.dell.com Message-ID: c4d69731002071553g2168430l353c5e1cdbdb5...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On some of my R410 servers the BIOS stops at a message: Press F1 to proceed or F2 to enter System Setup These are clustered machines so such a message just causes the whole automated boot process to halt since they don't have a keyboard or console attached where one presses this key. Is there a way to automate changing this via sysconfg? I found no clue in the Dell Deployment Guide. In the BIOS though there is a setting that chooses whether or not the system halts on the errors. -- Rahul Hi Rahul, If you bought the systems without an optical drive, it's likely that missing device that's halting the post process. Enter the BIOS either locally or via Drac F2 SATA Settings set the port to off exit and save If you didn't, you have to look at the entire POST output on the screen, not just the lines above Press F1... to see what the error is - it will be shown during POST. //Michael ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
