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

[Andrew Bogecho]

> I have a brand new poweredge 2900 with 10 SAS drives configured in two
> arrays via the built-in PERC 5 raid controller as:
>
> raid 1: 2x73GB
>
> raid 10: 8x300GB
>
> It's got 4GB of ram, and it's intended to be an NFS filestore.
>
>
> For some strange reason, logging in with ssh works great, it returns a
> prompt, all seems well.
>
> I go to run a simple command like 'top' or 'yum -y install <package>',
> and my xterm/ssh session just locks.  In some cases, it's drawn half of the
> top screen and hung, in other cases, it doesn't even do that.  Kill the
> xterm window, bring a new one up, right back in, try it again, it repeats.
>
>
> What's interesting to me is that I have all kinds of other 'lesser'
> systems running CentOS 4.4, and I have none of these issues with them.  My
> ~1.1TB raid 10 drive is
> sliced up into 4 parts, with the big one being about 950GB.  Near as I can
> figure, I haven't hit any limitations, but I'm stumped by something that I
> *think* is probably either relatively trivial, or
> just a straight out hardware incompatibility.  One thought is that it could
> be related to the Gb ethernet devices (bge).
>
> Commands like 'ifconfig -a' work great.  'dmesg | grep eth0' locks up
> the session.
>
> This is relatively frustrating.  Googling doesn't seem to net any real
> results, and I can't seem to find anything relevant in the logs.
>
>
> One more relevant bit to add, this behavior does not exist from the
> console.
>
> Peter
>
>
> --
> Peter Serwe <peter at infostreet dot com>
> http://www.infostreet.com
>
>
> "The only true sports are bullfighting, mountain climbing and auto
> racing." -Ernest Hemingway
>
> "Because everything else requires only one ball." -Unknown
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
>

Hi,

Have you tried booting with the non-smp kernel to see it the same problem
occurs?

If you have an Intel nic handy you could try to see if that eliminates the
problem. I recently had trouble with the sky2 module, but in that case, I
would loose all network connectivity until the module was reloaded. I have
now had no problems since switching to the Intel nic.

Hope that helps.

A.