I recently installed sarge on a uniprocessor Dell Poweredge 3250, and have been running the 2.4.27-2-mckinley kernel. Installation went fine, but I've since encountered a sequence of crashes and segfaults. From time to time I will find a command will segfault on one run, then work fine the next time. Large compiles are frequently unsuccessful.
This bears all the signs of hardware problems I've seen in the past on x86 and sparc kit, so I tried the Dell diagnostics CD. On the first pass this claimed to have "corrected" a CPU fault; on subsequent runs it has found no errors whatsoever. Given the inability to get a reproduceable fault from the diagnostics, Dell support suggested I try running the server under Win2003 or Redhat Advanced Server (ie, what they support). Rather than replacing debian with a full redhat installation, I tried using the kernel from RHEL3 (heavily patched 2.4.21) on the existing Debian userland. My standard "is this stable" test has been to try building gcc. Building while running the redhat kernel, I've seen absolutely no problems. On the stock sarge kernel, it's falling over pretty reliably. I've tried installing the 2.6 kernel from sarge but have so far been unable to persuade the system to successfully boot - I'm getting similar failures to those previously reported by Peter Hessler <http://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/2005/03/msg00015.html>. I've also tried kernels 2.4.29 and 2.4.31 as compiled myself - same problems as with the stock debian kernel. Has anyone else encountered similar issues with this hardware? Any suggestions as to what might be the problem? Thanks, Robin -- --------------- Robin Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------- Oxford University Computing Services ----------- Web: http://www.cynic.org.uk/ ------- (+44)(0)1865: 273212 (work) 273275 (fax) Mobile: 07776 235326 ------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
