Freezing during boot at cron

[vwarner]

I have a new build, and I am having a hell of a time getting it up and running.

Here are the specs.

Supermicro X8ST3-F
Xeon E5620 @ 2.4 GHz (quad core)
Intel 82574L (dual gigabit nic)
24GB RAM
2 intel 120GB SSD drives
16 Seagate 600GB Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives for our storage.
LSI 9750-16i4e SAS Raid Controller
It also has, and I don't have the model, a dual 10gig ethernet card.


I understand about installing it to a flash drive, and I've heard the talk about raid as well. I would install it to one SSD, and then basically we are going to have the second as a backup (non raid) in case the first fails.

Here is what my issue is. When I install it to the SSD, it gets to bringing the ethernet up, but cannot get an address. Yes, it is plugged in. I've swapped cables, and ports to make sure. I've also tried both nic's. Right now though, it will get past that. When it gets to starting cron, it just hangs indefinitely.

I tested the ram to make sure it was good. I verified my media. I've tried installing to the second SSD. I've installed to flash. The bios is current. I've combed through the bios settings. I havent been able to find any useful information on cron hanging.

Thoughts?

Valerie

 

[RichR]

I would say we are in the same "family" of hardware, so I have dealt with something very close to your setup...

What do either "boot" or "cron" have anything to do with your post?

A) I would use the onboard LAN, but make sure you are not plugged into the IPMI port (rtm). Are you using an additional card with the same controllers as your post says??? why? I can't see how this makes sense at all for this application -please splain, or get rid of the extra eth card -

B) the second SDD for the OS is a total waste of money

C) once you are sure you are NOT plugged into the IPMI port, and have tried and it still doesn't work, then check your DHCP server.

D) please report back with a status update

Rich

 

[vwarner]

Yes, I'm sure I wasn't plugged into ipmi. Made sure of that.

I get that in this setup that second ssd is a waste. I can only give truths and opinions to my boss soo many times.

Dhcp is good.

The issue turned out to be the dual 10gbe nic.


My boss wants wants iscsi from a server and it's failover cluster on the 10gbe nics. Standard connections over the gigabit nics.

I'm still having issues getting drivers installed for the lsi raid controller and the intel 10Gbe. Any thoughts?

 

[RichR]

1) So out of curiosity, are you mirroring the ssd's with the MB? The failover won't work like big boss person thinks. Assuming it was off site, if the ssd died, I could have it restored in less than 2 minutes including reboot time. I would install the OS on the secondary, save (actually copy/install) the config from the primary to the secondary, and just boot to primary, and if/when primary dies, boot to the secondary via the BIOS. With the built in IPMI, you could remotely power down, boot, change the boot drive, and be done. I would not however mirror them via the MB RAID.

I have a 9750-24i4e that I use for testing purposes only, which worked out of the box. The drivers are already installed so you shouldn't have to do anything. For production I currently use 3 9201-16i per machine and have had no problems yet.

So I'm clear, the on board LAN works now, but the card does not?

I don't know about the intel cards. It seems that the cards have the same chipset as the onboard LAN ports - I wonder if there are conflicts. I'm sure you've been here http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/config-network-setup.html. So you need 4 connections, or 2??