I can certainly give it a try. -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Chan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 12:28 PM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute Mystery!
I was actually going to suggest the same thing. I don't like Dell that much myself. But have you considered lowering the speed on the CPU, and put minimum amount of memory on the Dell. Then change the Memory dump to full dump. And see if you can catch something then. Andrew, MCSE (NT & W2K) + CCNA -----Original Message----- From: Ryan Malayter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Posted At: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 9:12 AM Posted To: DiscussionGroup Conversation: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M ystery! Subject: RE: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M ystery! There were a ton of heat-related stability problems with the 1.13 Ghz PIII when it first came out - so much so that Intel pulled it off the market for a while. I thought the re-released PIIIs > 1GHzs were on made with the 0.13 micron process, but that doesn't seem to be the case I also note that the 2550 is quite slender at 4U... And yours seem to be fully loaded. Could this be a heat problem with the 2550 case design in particular? Have you tried moving all drives externally to reduce heat? Have you tried 1 Ghz or slower CPUs in the systems? Or maybe better heatsinks/fans/compunds than the stock Dells? What about better chipset or video card heatsinks? -----Original Message----- From: Ed Esgro [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:44 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: RE: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M ystery! Chris, Apples to Apples. Do you have another server maybe a Compaq? How about if you build it exactly the same way as the Dell, same OS, Service Pack, Software, etc. Plug it in the same exact power outlet. Let it run, see if it reboots. If it does you have a power issue and not a server issue. That is what I would do at this point. If it is a power issue, I would need to resolve that any way possible. Even if it meant buying another server just to clarify. -----Original Message----- From: Szlucha, Chris [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:36 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: RE: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M ystery! Are you sassing me? :) Actually, we already tried to tell the government to force Dell to take the pieces of crap back, but the government can't accept credits, so I'm stuck with them. -----Original Message----- From: King, John [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:33 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute Mystery! Send it back and contact Sun MicroSystems... -----Original Message----- From: Szlucha, Chris [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 10:00 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: RE: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M ystery! We've brought that up to them also, and we assumed when the system we supplied got sent back to the lab, they would do just that. But after a week without being able to reproduce the reboots in their lab, they rebuilt the system. And again, it's not unusual to go over a month without it happening, then all of a sudden, BOOM! Reboots. Other times, they reboot within hours of being brought online. Funny thing is, in the beginning, when we started swapping hardware, it would stop the reboots for quite some time. But the usually came back, which is why we switched our focus to software. But Dell seemed to be exclusively fixated on software being the issue. And the agents have been removed to no avail, since Dell's own engineers on multiple occasions told us the monitoring agent software was buggy and didn't work correctly. They even went so far as to tell us that they even report hardware failures repeatedly that didn't exist and that we shouldn't use them. BTW - if any of you get those silly Y-cables for power with your Dell systems, throw them out (I know - that's an obvious thing to state when talking about redundancy). Dell came out and told us that, although they ship them as a convenience to some customers, they don't recommend using them as they too have caused unexpected reboots. -----Original Message----- From: Rocky Stefano [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 9:24 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute Mystery! Chris I'm not happy with Dells either but from the sounds of the problem it seems software related since they've shipped you new boxes and you have the same problem. How about stripping some of those Dell management packages for a awhile and seeing what its like? As well can't they put a debugger on the system? Yes I know it will slow it down but it may catch something. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Szlucha, Chris Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 9:15 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: RE: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M ystery! Yes, we have physically been standing in front of them as they reboot. Goes through the POST and everything and the only indication that the reboot occurred, other than watching it happen (which I personally have watched) is a 6008 event from NT (Unexpected reboot). And, yes, bizarre is an understatement. We have had daily phone conferences with Dell and have even had their Directors and a few VPs attend, as well as engineers from every department and international support, and the Quality control folks all the way up the chain. Needless to say, no one is happy and I hate Dells at this point. -----Original Message----- From: Evans Chris - cevans [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 9:08 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: RE: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute M yste ry! Chris, I have to ask this because if I don't somebody will. How do you know it is rebooting, are you standing there watching it? Are you saying the server physically reboots itself goes through post then reloads the OS with out even an "Event Viewer" started event in the event log? If so this is bizarre! Have you looked at the Uptime utility from the resource kit, maybe it can give you some more info, although I think it really just looks in the event logs. -----Original Message----- From: Szlucha, Chris [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 8:01 AM To: NT 2000 Discussions Subject: Spontaneous Reboots on Dell w/Win2K with NO TRACE! Absolute Myste ry! Ok, here is something that we've been working on that has gone all the way up to Michael Dell himself that I'd like some input on from you guys. Has anyone seen spontaneous reboots on Dell systems where there is absolutely no trace left anywhere in either the Windows environment nor the hardware environment (Dell ESM logs)? Dell's "top engineers" and 5 of us here at the SEC have been working on it for literally 3 months, almost every day, to no avail. Here's the configuration: Hardware: Dell 2550 Dual PIII 1133 Mhz (BIOS v A05) 2 GB RAM PERC 3 PCI RAID Controller 4 72 GB Fujitsu Hard Drives Intel 8255x-based Integrated Fast Ethernet NIC DRAC-II card External PowerVault 128T LTO Tape Library connected via Adaptec AIC-7899 PCI SCSI card Software: Windows 2000 Server w/ SP2 Terminal Services for remote admin Veritas Backup Exec v8.6 Remotely Anywhere Dell Server Agents as follows- Dell OpenManage Server Agent v. 4.3.0 (BLD_2922) DRAC-II Server Monitoring SNMP MIB Agent v. 2.0, Firmware v. 2.40 Dell OpenManage Array Manager v. 3.0 Network Associates NetShield 4.5, current engine and DATs Executive Software Network Undelete v. 2 WQuinn Associates Storage CeNTral v.4.1 build 461 We use these servers only for file and print serving with no other funny software installed and no "unnecessary" services running. All flash-able components have been flashed to the current level and drivers are up-to-date. And during the installation of Veritas Backup Exec, we have the Veritas drivers installed for the backup devices. These servers reboot at random and leave no trace in the event logs, nothing in the hardware logs about any hardware issues. There is no blue screen and no Dr. Watson events, no system dumps, literally NOTHING to trace this to anything or give us any indication as to where to start looking. We have picked apart our build process, which BTW works absolutely perfectly on a Compaq server, and Dell has even taken one of our rebooting systems back to their labs for analysis, again to no avail. The failure rate for us was somewhere around 75-80% on these machines. It seemed for a while to be hardware, as we could sometimes replace the motherboard and memory and have the systems work again. But then we had repeat performances of the reboots. Systems will reboot sometimes immediately, sometimes they run for a month and a half before rebooting. We have stress-tested these systems using 2 or 3 different stress test packages, and these reboots haven't replicated in the lab but once. This is a real head-scratcher. Any thoughts? And remember, the easy things have more than likely already been thought of and tried, but I'm willing to entertain any ideas (and so is Dell at this point). Thanks all! -Chris ------ You are subscribed as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe send a blank email to %%email.unsub%% ********************************************************************* The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. 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