Strange HP server

tarkhil

tarkhil

Hello

I'm trying to set up some HP server, and after several Linuxes failed, I've tried FreeBSD as a last resort. At least it gave some meaningful diagnostics.

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What could this be? Box is slow (VERY slow) on POST, but self-tests are just fine.
It's a Proliant with bios P89 v3.04, 32 Gb RAM, 2 Intel Xeons
 
tarkhil said:
Box is slow (VERY slow) on POST
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POST on a server generally takes a long time. It takes much longer than the typical consumer desktop system. Usually because of RAID cards or HBAs that need to be initialized.
 
Actually it didn't give you any diagnostic information, that's just a regular boot information.
From the BIOS P89 I see it's some sort of gen9 server. Is is a standalone (DL) or a blade one (BL)?

What was the reason of the failure on those Linuxes ?

Did you try the text/serial console output of the server ? Login to console, use command vsp or textcons, do you see any output ?
 
tarkhil said:
POST is slow and unresponsive. Expecting result in 5-10 minutes.
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These servers start in text, they run some early initialization routines and then jump to graphical interface where other routines are initialized. Most of the time they end up in memory check routines. But that's true for 1TB+ ram; 32GB is practically nothing.

In this graphical interface it does say what it's doing. You could measure what takes too long. As SirDice said above, HBA init, raid inits can take some time, especially if SAN boot was enabled and box is not connected to SAN anymore (flogi/plogi routines being retried by server).

tarkhil said:
POST is slow and unresponsive.
Click to expand...
You have few options during this early boot. E.g. does it react to F11 (f11 button highlighted on the bottom) ? If so it's working and responding to your commands. It just takes longer due to stuff mentioned above.
 
You won't believe, it's still booting. I suppose that's a hardware problem. Boot is slow as hell as well.

Overall, it looks like someone has replaced Xeon with 8088, and I'm booting from floppy.
 
tarkhil said:
You won't believe, it's still booting. I suppose that's a hardware problem. Boot is slow as hell as well.
Click to expand...
You might want to check the memory configuration. If you have DIMMs in the wrong sockets the whole system will be really, really slow.
 
SirDice said:
POST on a server generally takes a long time. It takes much longer than the typical consumer desktop system. Usually because of RAID cards or HBAs that need to be initialized.
Click to expand...
It takes MUCH longer than even common HP POST. It's not the first server on my way.

_martin said:
Actually it didn't give you any diagnostic information, that's just a regular boot information.
From the BIOS P89 I see it's some sort of gen9 server. Is is a standalone (DL) or a blade one (BL)?

What was the reason of the failure on those Linuxes ?

Did you try the text/serial console output of the server ? Login to console, use command vsp or textcons, do you see any output ?
Click to expand...

They wrote a BUNCH of lines, I could not get reason. Server is DL. I'm on iLO console.

It's still "Loading kernel...".
 
SirDice said:
You might want to check the memory configuration. If you have DIMMs in the wrong sockets the whole system will be really, really slow.
Click to expand...
Okay, I'll have to visit the thing and try. Some times ago I've managed to boot it and it was ok. No one tampered with the box since that time. I'll check memory configuration from papers.
 
These boxes have AHS - active health system log. It will log any HW issue that was found by FW. Look around the ILO web -- there are few tabs where health is reported (even its own memory tab where you can see if there's any problem with memory modules).

tarkhil said:
I'm on iLO console.
Click to expand...
That's why I asked to verify the boot progress also on textcons/vsp. While not default behavior there's a chance you are redirecting everything to vsp and hence you don't see any progress on ILO web console.
 
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