[CentOS] CentOS 4.4 Strange hang on a poweredge 2900.

[Peter Serwe]

Brent wrote:
> first I would try the Nic Card. If for some reason that doesn't work I it
> wouldn't hurt to try the 64 bit version if the nic card doesn' work.
>
> I believe there is physical limit of 4 gigs on a 32 bit system. So you may
> want to consider going 64 anyways for this server.
>
> If none of this fixes it you got a bad MB or CPU and time for Dell to
> replace it.
>   
At this point, I've tried swapping the NIC's, it doesn't seem to change 
the behavior.

I'm currently downloading the iso images for 4.4-ia64 just to see if 
that helps, but I'm
not necessarily getting a warm and fuzzy that's going to do anything for me.

I also found that the system couldn't seem to find my almost 1TB raid 
partition label
when I rebooted,  ( I have one partition that's egregiously larger than 
the rest), and
it choked, forcing me into a repair shell.  After mounting the rest of 
the partitions
by label, I ended up changing them all to reference the actual device 
instead of
bothering with the labels in /etc/fstab, and everything came up normally.

A straight 4GB of ram right on the limit shouldn't be an issue, for 
more, allegedly
you can use the kernel-hugemem.i686 kernel if you exceed that, but for 
4GB, I should
be fine with the regular 2.6.9-42.0.3.EL-smp-i686 I'm running.

I'm not precisely certain, but it seems to me that this might be an 
issue with the storage
component more than anything else.  Anybody have any anecdotal data with 
stripe/block
sizing on the Dell boxes and it's possible effects on performance? 

I still don't see any issues from the console, but I'm taking a stab in 
the dark here, since
the only differences between two machines I have sitting in front of me 
is that one's a
dual Celeron PE1950 with less storage and SATA drives (same amount of 
RAM, recognized
fine by the 2.6.9-42.0.3.EL-smp-i686 kernel) and the other is a dual 
Xeon, same ram, a lot
more storage, and SAS instead of SATA drives on a beefier raid controller.

Other than that, there are probably all kinds of detailed differences a 
bunch of the other
tiny, usually (relatively) insignificant pieces of hardware that I 
usually don't run into running
various i386/686 *nix operating systems.

Peter


-- 
Peter Serwe <peter at infostreet dot com>
http://www.infostreet.com

"The only true sports are bullfighting, mountain climbing and auto racing." -Earnest Hemingway

"Because everything else requires only one ball." -Unknown