Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 01:31:41 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Tillman Hodgson" <tillman@seekingfire.com>, <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Compaq ProLiant 1600 server freezes when detecting keyboard Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNOEEHFDAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20060110144758.GU25702@seekingfire.com>
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Another thing you really need to watch and that isn't common knowledge with Compaq proliants, is the use of non-Compaq disk drives in the systems. It isn't recommended and sometimes will cause problems like this. Compaq actually has a huge program that they distribute that you expand onto about 20 or so floppies, which's sole purpose is to boot the server into DOS and do firmware updates to their hard disk drives. Because of the length of time it takes to deal with this on a server with a big array, it's quite often ignored by techs. Because of this few techs ever stop to ask the question of why is this necessary? After all the hard drives in the array are OEMed to Compaq from someone like Seagate or such, Compaq certainly doesen't make it's own drives. Yet the frequency of firmware updates to generally available disk drives from the major manufacturers is much less. So then why do you see 3-4 disk drive firmware updates for Compaq-branded disk drives, yet the same model Seagate that isn't Compaq branded, you don't see this on Seagate's site? Compaq has a long history of tampering with peripheral firmware. For example I've got on my desk a Compaq professional workstation that has an Adaptec scsi controller in it - the card looks identical to a standard off-the-shelf Adaptec SCSI card - yet if I take this card and swap it out with the same model scsi card in a random system, that random system will refuse to boot. I've got back at the shop a Compaq DL360 (early generation) that has the same spontaneous reboot problem with Solaris x86. Yet if I put FreeBSD on it, it never reboots, and if I put the Solaris on a different Compaq DL360 we have that was bought at a similar time, it runs rock solid. The only difference between the 2 DL360s is the disks in the one with the reboot problem - they are aftermarket, not from Compaq. Ted
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