Morning all,
I actually sent this email last week, but I had attached some pictures
and a BIOS file so it was in a pending state, and I just wanted to make
sure I kept everyone up to date. That said I honestly do not know how
many people actually receive this, but I wanted to at least update the
group on the ever so slight remotely off chance that someone else
happens upon this issue.
First, I want to thank Robert Townley and Michael Stumpf, who both lent
a hand in this ordeal. It was eventually Michael who helped the most
after we discovered that the schematics he had for the board were those
for the 2nd generation XS23-TY3, and not the SX23-SB board that I had.
After some back and forth with Michael I ended up reaching out directly
to SuperMicro, and after spending about 30 minutes with them trying to
figure out where in the heck this guy came from, they got me over to a
guy who has been there for quite some time and remember these guys.
Thankfully he was able to get me the correct Owner's Manual and the last
BIOS version that was released for this specific board.
During this whole process I had been through the BIOS settings several
times, and was just flabbergasted at not being able to find literally
any information anywhere about this issue. I had even looked all around
the interfaces on the board for any type of pin grouping that might
physically disable the port, but I didn't see anything that jumped out
at me.
Though my initial plan was to access the console and see if there are
any other settings there, which I still plan to do, I was at the point
where I was going to jumper clear the CMOS, I just needed to find the
pins. Now that I had the correct manual I found a nice diagram on page
1-4, and while I was looking for the CMOS clear pins, I noticed on page
1-5, under the quick reference guide was a very handy jumper reference,
and wouldn't you believe it there on lines 2 and 3 were JPL1 and JPL2
for GLAN1 and GLAN2 with 'open' being the default and the ports enabled,
with jumpered being disabled. Seeing as how I brought the first
replacement board that I thought was "bad" with me to the office, I
pulled it out to investigate.
Granted you almost need a microscope to read the writing, but sure
enough right there between the South Bridge chip and DIMM A was a white
jumper disabling JPL2 / GLAN2 / NIC2. See 'board_01.jpg' and
'board_02.jpg' attached to the email. I have not actually made it back
to my rack to actually pull the server down and verify that this is the
same issue, but I'm fairly confident that this was the culprit.
I still plan on accessing the serial console to see the options that are
there, plus I am curious about the final firmware update to these
boards. The last update was 1.2C, and I've actually attached that file
on this email. It is X7DWT0.B19, and seeing as how I have a couple of
these boards to spare, I'm going to go ahead and flash one of them using
FlashRom [1] as SuperMicro said they no longer had access to the AMI
flashing utility.
###UPDATE FROM 01/11/2020### I did make it to the environment this
weekend, and sure enough the jumper was in place. I pulled it and when
it powered back up she was lit up light a Christmas Tree. I did not get
a chance to try the BIOS update as I didn't have the time I wanted to
spend on it, and I sure didn't want to rush things.
When I do connect to the console and try the BIOS update, I'll update
everyone again.
Again, thank you Robert and Michael for your help, and I hope everyone
has a good evening.
-Jason
Links:
------
[1] https://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom
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