Hi, > Mobo was a Tyan Thunder K8W. (S2885) personally I'm very disappointed about Tyan, well I only know their opteron mainboards, but thats already sufficient to never buy their mainboards again. Server B (failover): S2880, as soon as a cable is plugged in into one of the onboard broadcom NICs, the system crashes. Broadcom driver doesn't need to be loaded, system may already crash during the pre-boot initialisation or later on during the kernel boot-procedure. Server A (main): First S2882 board crashed rather soon during pre-boot initialisation, in the bios setup, during the boot-procedure and sometimes it was even running stable - for a few hours. After returning the server, we got back the system with a new mainboard (if it only hadn't taken them two month to do this :-( ). With the new mainboard it was running stable for about 7 month and, we only experienced some rather strange ext2 errors. Interesting also to note that those ext2 partitions were mirrored by drbd and those errors could not be observed on the corresponding partions on Server B. After exchanging one of the software components that required ext2, we could get completely rid of those ext2 partitions and everything was fine until 1.5 weeks ago. The server suddenly crashed and crashed again shortly after rebooting. Reiserfsck found pretty much problems on the root partions and we decided to use our backup. For some reasons we are pretty convinced that those ext2 and reiserfs errors are due to the onbaord SIL3114 controller (its probably not RAM, since we monitor the ECC memory using bluesmoke, futhermore, the much bigger data partitions connected to the onboard SCSI controller are (so far) not affected by any of those problems) . We now added an additional promise controller. Unfortunately this didn't solve our crash problem. After updating the bios to the recent version, the promise bios complained that it can't find any harddisk, downgrading to the version from last July solved this problem and also almost our crash problem (bevor updating the bios was from last March or April). It now only crashes sometimes during the bios initialisation... Cluster, 16 nodes: S2881 boards, master server crashed rather often until we updated to linux-2.6.9 (old kernel was 2.4.27). Cheers, Bernd PS: I'm also mailling this to Tyan. I'm curious what they will say about this report. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
