[PLUG] system locking up...

["George Gallen" <ggallen@slackinc.com>]

Title: system locking up...

Making matters of getting a new system a little more urgent.....

For unknown (at least to me) reasons, our system as locked up, nothing responds.
  Control alt delete doesn't do anything, telnet doesn't work, the console doesn't respond.

Hard reboot is the only savior...and the messages log have nothing in them to give me a clue.

Now a little about our system.

It's a quad Xeon motherboard, however, when the goofs that put our system together they
used Xeon DP chips instead of Xeon MP chips (because they were cheaper!!). According
to motherboard MFG (Supermicro), since they are DP chips, they can only be addressed
to 0 and 1, effectively, the motherboard doesn't "see" the other two chips. the goofs felt
all 4 CPUS were working when they loaded linux, and it reported 4 processors. Supermicro
explained that as each Xeon appears as 2 processors, and with quad setup, it should have
report 8 CPUs. They were amazed themselves that the system was running on the 4 DP's.

The prior two years, we had been running using the linux-up (7.2) kernel because the smp
kernel didn't support our RAID controller. Now that we are on RH 8.0, we started using the
linux-smp kernel.

on the last reboot, I booted into the linux-up again, thinking maybe those two extra DP chips
might be causing some kind of collisions for processing, so far (fingers crossed) no lockup.

Any thoughts? or what files I could check after a reboot to see if there were any other issues
that were OS related? I truely believe this to be hardware.

George Gallen
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Accounting/Data Division
ggallen@slackinc.com
ph:856.848.1000 Ext 220

SLACK Incorporated - Delivering the best in health care information and education worldwide.
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