How to: Avoid dead ASRock C2x50 D4i boards by disabling the watchdog

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nickt

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Hi all,

This is a fairly trivial "how to", but it might just save your board if you have an ASRock C2x50 D4i board. These boards currently have a firmware bug which causes BMC flash memory to be written every time the watchdog is patted. Given enough time, the flash memory massively exceeds its rewrite capacity and you've got a board that won't even POST.

I described my experience when my board died in this post. There seem to be quite a few people losing these boards currently, for example this post.

There are two steps to follow, taken from the current bug report #16190.

First step - disable the watchdog in BIOS. The setting for this is on the "H/W Monitor" page, below the fan control settings.

bios.png


Second step - disable watchdogd in FreeNAS by creating a tuneable. In the FreeNAS GUI navigate to System > Tunables and create a new tunable with the following settings.

Screen Shot 2016-10-22 at 5.17.17 PM.png


That's it!

If you like, you can verify that the overly frequent flash memory writes have ceased by SSH / TelNet'ing to your BMC (IPMI) IP address and running the command:
Code:
inotifywait -mr -e close_write /conf/

In a bad system, you'll see the following file written to every second:
Code:
/conf/BMC1/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE IPMIConfig.dat

Good luck!

Nick
 
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Ericloewe

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Would you mind posting this as a Resource? Once you're done, we'll just keep this thread as the discussion thread.
 

Arwen

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Thanks, this seems to work. Glad my FreeNAS Mini now has a fighting chance to live!
 

nickt

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Ericloewe

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Thanks, it'll be useful for people on older versions of FreeNAS 9.10 that won't be getting jpaetzel's fix, or if the fix proves insufficient.
 

Ross Moutell

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Fix is out?

BIOS/BMC Update
00.30.00 2/15/2017 BMC Megarac SP GUI 12.83MB
1.Set Fan default to 30%
2.When LAN is lined-up, lit up LAN LED.
3.Fix on Watchdog Timer.

Installed with no issues.
 
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BigMike

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Can someone help me understand the watchdog timer? I have followed nickt's instructions, and disabled the watchdog timer in the BIOS, and created the tunable in FreeNAS setting watchdogd_enable to NO, With the new BMC update 00.30 it seems the flash wear-out issue is probably fixed. Could watchdog timer be enabled again in BIOS? It seems if FreeNAS were to go unresponsive that the watchdog might reboot the machine for me, but frankly, I have never needed that capability. And if watchdog timer is enabled, is FreeNAS (latest stable and future version 10) supposed to work with a watchdog timer?
 

Ericloewe

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nickt

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