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I've had a bunch of Intel Dual Xeon 1U servers at work for more than a year now, and it's always been bugging me that there was a little light on the front that i've seen in a variety of different states (Green/Yellow/Orange/Red, and blinking vs. solid). The servers didn't come with any hardcopy manual, and I've been too lazy to look at the CD that shipped with them.
However, lately one of them has been giving very strange problems. Tomcat on it just keels over and dies, with a signal 11 from whatever JDK is on the machine (I've tried a few, as well as using known good system snapshots and more).
We shipped it back to the supplier, and Intel replaced the motherboard, but that still hasn't solved it.
So I set out to try and dig into it myself. I've tried everything I can on the machine: switching RAM, using a different IDE controller, using a different hard drive, running on just one CPU, but still no luck. I can't switch the power supply as it's a custom connector :-(.
I finally dug out the manual, and found these servers support a technology known as IPMI. It's basically i2c/lm-sensors on some major steroids. Gentoo didn't have any support for this stuff, but SUSE Enterprise Server and RedHat Advanced Server did. So now new 5 packages later, Gentoo does support this stuff, and my servers are spewing loads of data at me - but I still haven't figure out the problem of the server that isn't working.
Just how much data you ask?
See this sample stuff from the OpenHPI folk:
http://wiki.openhpi.org/OpenHPIWiki/OpenHPIDumps/2%2e0%2e2/IPMI/hpisensors/x346
http://wiki.openhpi.org/OpenHPIWiki/OpenHPIDumps/2%2e0%2ex/ipmidirect/hpitop/BC-T
The new packages are:
sys-libs/freeipmi
sys-libs/openipmi
sys-libs/openhpi
sys-apps/ipmitool
sys-apps/ipmiutil
I still have two things to do, to make it fully useful.
freeipmi - init.d script for bmc-sensor
openhpi - init.d script for openhpid
I'm also slightly concerned that some of the binaries might need better names, as they might conflict with other things in future:
freeipmi: /usr/sbin/sensors
ipmiutil: /usr/sbin/xmlconfig /usr/sbin/sensor
In other Gentoo news, I've assembled my own upstream package for a client to readhead(2) (see bug #64724). The new client reads from a file instead of taking it's stuff from argv, so it can be much faster. I still need to see about possibly putting together a patch for /sbin/rc to do an early call to readahead for things it uses. Looking at the bootchart results from this, the largest remaining boot-time hogs are modules-update and hotplug.
Also, since ciaranm put up his Amazon wishlist, and got a book from a grateful user, I've decided to follow suit as well, and here is my wishlist.
However, lately one of them has been giving very strange problems. Tomcat on it just keels over and dies, with a signal 11 from whatever JDK is on the machine (I've tried a few, as well as using known good system snapshots and more).
We shipped it back to the supplier, and Intel replaced the motherboard, but that still hasn't solved it.
So I set out to try and dig into it myself. I've tried everything I can on the machine: switching RAM, using a different IDE controller, using a different hard drive, running on just one CPU, but still no luck. I can't switch the power supply as it's a custom connector :-(.
I finally dug out the manual, and found these servers support a technology known as IPMI. It's basically i2c/lm-sensors on some major steroids. Gentoo didn't have any support for this stuff, but SUSE Enterprise Server and RedHat Advanced Server did. So now new 5 packages later, Gentoo does support this stuff, and my servers are spewing loads of data at me - but I still haven't figure out the problem of the server that isn't working.
Just how much data you ask?
See this sample stuff from the OpenHPI folk:
http://wiki.openhpi.org/OpenHPIWiki/OpenHPIDumps/2%2e0%2e2/IPMI/hpisensors/x346
http://wiki.openhpi.org/OpenHPIWiki/OpenHPIDumps/2%2e0%2ex/ipmidirect/hpitop/BC-T
The new packages are:
sys-libs/freeipmi
sys-libs/openipmi
sys-libs/openhpi
sys-apps/ipmitool
sys-apps/ipmiutil
I still have two things to do, to make it fully useful.
freeipmi - init.d script for bmc-sensor
openhpi - init.d script for openhpid
I'm also slightly concerned that some of the binaries might need better names, as they might conflict with other things in future:
freeipmi: /usr/sbin/sensors
ipmiutil: /usr/sbin/xmlconfig /usr/sbin/sensor
In other Gentoo news, I've assembled my own upstream package for a client to readhead(2) (see bug #64724). The new client reads from a file instead of taking it's stuff from argv, so it can be much faster. I still need to see about possibly putting together a patch for /sbin/rc to do an early call to readahead for things it uses. Looking at the bootchart results from this, the largest remaining boot-time hogs are modules-update and hotplug.
Also, since ciaranm put up his Amazon wishlist, and got a book from a grateful user, I've decided to follow suit as well, and here is my wishlist.