[CentOS] Random server reboot after update to CentOS 5.3

Wed May 27 23:03:42 UTC 2009
Dave Jones <davejones70 at gmail.com>

On Friday 22 May 2009, Peter Hopfgartner wrote:
...
>> Would it make sense to install the kernel from CentOS 5.2? Any
>> contraindications?

>As others have said, you should still have the 5.2 kernel around. Just change
>the grub.conf and reboot. It makes no sense to start swapping around hardware
>until you've tried to revert the kernel.

>That said, we've seen hangs and strange kernel messages on several different
>server platforms (HP DL140g3: NMI-related messages logged, HP DL160g5: hangs
>semi-randomly) with the new 5.3 kernels. All of these problems could be
>worked around by booting with the kernel option "nmi_watchdog=0".

>/Peter

I am experiencing the same issue with random reboots after a 5.3
upgrade.  Sometimes it will go for days without rebooting then today
it has rebooted 6 times at random times.  I have modified grub.conf to
go back to 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5xen on my dom0 and my only domU so we
will see what happens (or hopefully doesn't happen) the next few days.

I have a 3.0 P4 CPU with HT that does not support 64-bit so it's
running an i686 kernel.  It does have a Broadcom NIC like an earlier
post was suspicious of:
02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82562EZ 10/100 Ethernet
Controller (rev 02)
02:09.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5703X
Gigabit Ethernet (rev 02)

I have upgraded about 8 other servers with no random reboot problems
but they are all running on a newer processors with a 64-bit kernel.
-- 
Dave Jones