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I killed it...
Oops.. I killed my server. Remotely. Ugh. I dont know WHY I keep having troubles with the /store filesystem, but I'm just about to give up on ReiserFS as a filesystem. It may have saved me in the past, but that box has a problem with either Reiser or IDE. I have even moved from the on-board controller to a PCI IDE card. Ugh! Anyway.. Can't fix it now.. Let the mail queue up, and the web pages rot. This IS the failover box! I need my real server back!
Archive Entry 71: I killed it...
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Oh yeah, also check the power supply for continuity with your voltmeter. You could have a flaky P/S too.
Comment by: Jerry
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Check out this document: http://pauillac.inria.fr/~harley/pws/service/co_mem.htm (and all the documents listed here http://pauillac.inria.fr/~harley/pws/service/) you need to get to the SRM console firmware to run the tests, I dont think the Alphabios has any firmware console tests in it.
Comment by: Jerry
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Well, this is my FOURTH attempt at writing this followup, so it's getting cut short and sweet. The server is up and running, 2.4.17 kernel downgrade seems to be keeping the IDE bus happy. It still reboots though. This is a DEC AlphaStation 164SX with a 21164PC processor at 533mhz with 512M RAM. I should test the RAM in a PC, I haven't thought to do that. It won't take all DIMMs - some 512 sticks I have are outright rejected. I'll have to experiment with that more now that I have more free sticks to play with. The system uses AlphaBIOS (to boot NT - exclusively). So, it boots linload.exe which in turn bootstraps MILO which starts the kernel. I just need to get my other Alpha back so I have a backup box, and a playbox so I can upgrade to Gentoo Linux and transition over the way I did when I upgraded RedHat 5.2 to 7.1. Until then...
Comment by: Kelly
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The Alpha is still cheaper than AMD's clawhammer though. Street price for the 900+ pin AMD chip is about $700 (CPU only). I can buy a nice used Alphastation 500 for a lot less. The Itanium was ridiculously priced (something like 2k or so I believe) It's strange, the Alpha prototypes were pushing the 1Ghz barrier more than a decade ago but HPaQ doesn't offer a server model that approaches more than 800+ MhZ per processor. Dec fumbled the ball on that, so did Compaq, I suppose HP will too. So many lost opportunities. It's a shame.
Comment by: Jerry
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I am assuming you have an Alphastation of some stripe or variety. The Multias are crap but I have worked with a lot of Alphastation 250's and the earlier iterations are not the most reliable machines. (It seems there is a design problem with the earlier motherboards and we had a local field service guy come out and replace a lot of mobo's over the years) The AS500 series are a bit better. There are hw console tests available but the most generic test is just TEST at the alpha console prompt. I don't know of a software equivalent for memtest on the Alpha's. Maybe you should switch to a different distro (with the newer kernel) as an experiment.
Comment by: Jerry
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It may be time to retire the Alphas. One is in fact dying, and the other is AWOL. But, I don't think that Reiser is really the problem. It's the IDE driver. When I boot to an older 2.4.17 kernel, there are no IDE issues. But it still reboots. I think the reboots are hardware failures. Wish I could "memtest" it... As for the 2.4.20 kernel, I think it is the source of all the harddrive problems. But I am using XFS on all my Gentoo systems, and I am definately going Gentoo.
Comment by: Kelly
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Yeah, ReiserFS is crap these days. I only trust XFS for Linux. It seems to be very robust. But I'd also try and get off those DEC Alphas. They are just aging hardware. The Alpha was a wonderful architecture. So sad it went the way of the dinosaur.
Comment by: MYG
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