[CentOS] Motherboard and chipset compatibility

Mon Aug 12 18:54:51 UTC 2013
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Warren Young wrote:
> On 8/12/2013 11:01, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> VERY STRONG RECOMMENDATION: DON'T buy Supermicro. They have a *lot* of
>> trouble with this new, fuzzy concept called "quality control".
>
> We have a *lot* of SuperMicro based systems in the field, and they
> aren't failing.  In fact, I can't remember the last time we had to fix
> an actual motherboard issue.  It seems like every field hardware failure
> for years has come down to dying HDDs.
>
> We did once upon a time have a QC problem with SuperMicro, around Y2K,
> but that was because we chose to use AMD processors, and AMD OEM
> fan/heat sink combos at the time used little 60mm 6000 RPM pancake fans
> that would seize up after a few years.  This was before processors had
> overtemp shutdown features, so once the fan seized, the processors would
> cook themselves.
<snip>
> You'll notice that both of these failure modes are due to mechanical
> wear.  I can't say I've *ever* seen a SuperMicro board fail in any of
> the solid-state components, solder joints, capacitors, etc.

Well, *all* of these are rackmount servers, with no moving-the-server
wear. We start seeing userspace compute-intensive processes crashing the
system a number of times a day. We have a canned package that we send to
Penguin on the disk we put in, which has a generic CentOS install, and
running that, the crash is repeatable. They replace the m/b, and it
doesn't happen again. (Or at least with that program - we've got issues
with some *other* users, with different software, that seem to be crashing
it. With us, this is seriously important, since the users' jobs run for
days, sometimes a week or more, on the cluster....

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