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

Mon Dec 25 18:06:56 UTC 2006
Damon L. Chesser <damon at damtek.com>

Andrew Bogecho wrote:
>> Peter Serwe wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> Not answering your question, but I have to ask, what does ifconfig -a
>> do?  I man ifconfig and it does not show an -a switch.  Looked it up on the
>> Internet, still can't find a -a switch.
>>
>>     
>
> Hi,
>
> >From the ifconfig man page:
>
>        If no arguments are given, ifconfig displays the status of the
> currently active interfaces.  If a single interface argument is
> given, it displays the status of the given interface only; if a
> single -a argument is given, it displays the status of all
> interfaces, even those that are down.  Otherwise, it configures an
> interface.
>
> A.
>
>
>   
>> It seems like this is a NIC issue or I/O of the MB.  Do you have another
>> NIC you can test it with?
>>
>>
>> --
>> Damon L. Chesser
>> damon at damtek.com damon at okfairtax.org
>>
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>>
>>     
>
>
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>   
Ahhh, I figured it meant -a as in "all" but I was looking for the list 
of switches like:

-a --all lists all interfaces
-b  --bummer  this switch breaks everything
etc

but I did not READ the man page but neither did I see a list of 
switches.  Figures.  Thanks :)

-- 
Damon L. Chesser
damon at damtek.com
damon at okfairtax.org