Stupid_hardware_changes

title: Stupid hardware changes date: 2006-01-01 22:36:23

I got these 1U units 'cos I was running out of room, and I figured I'd test these out. Natch, I'm running into problems with them.

First off, I've got one that has panicked on me a few times in the last week. There's never any indication in the logs of what's happened, of course. I thought it was heat, but it recurred after moving it around. Fortunately I had a monitor hooked up, and I saw the panic message. Nothing much that I can make sense of, except that it seems to be in the middle of dealing with an interrupt when it happens -- part of the message had scrolled off the screen. I've turned on console logging and hooked up a serial cable to another machine, so now I wait.

I'm unsure if the second problem is on the same machine or its twin, but it's strange. When SSHing in, or using rsync to transfer big files between the two, I suddenly found the session gone and this error on the screen:

Disconnecting:  Corrupt MAC on input

A bunch of Googling turns up this thread on Google and this patch from Andrew Morton's kernel, which apparently just missed going into 2.6.11. I'll have to give that a try and see how it does. (I feel oddly proud of using a patch from Morton -- something about being that much closer to celebrity. Sometimes I have absolutely no clue how my mind works.)

How things have changed, BTW...I had to check to see what the latest kernel was. Also, when I was trying to get these machines working, I had difficulty with the stock 2.6.8 kernel in Debian -- wouldn't recognize the hard drive. My response? Grab the 2.6.11 stock kernel from Debian, rather than compile my own. Strange days, indeed.

One difference between the two: ACPI was enabled in the BIOS of one, and not the other. Weirdly, HT depends on ACPI...who knew? Also, the IRQ list is slightly differnet without them; you don't get IRQ set to Cascade if HT/ACPI is disabled.