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

Sun Dec 24 16:08:19 UTC 2006
Damon L. Chesser <damon at damtek.com>

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.

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