rx4640 component failures

[DR M.JAVED K JADOON(PHD]

Following incident happened with me on rx4640;
Out of 4 cpus 1 failed upon adding new memory to the system. I have worked with alpha servers for years. Never observe such cases.

Do you have any comments regarding these new bread of servers in terms of component failure cases?

[Mridul Shrivastava]

How did you notice that one CPU failed.

Have we tried running online diags on the system and check.....

If the memory has been installed by HP CE or all precaution like anti static band etc have been taken care of then its very unlikely that installing/replacing a component will fail the other..

[Hoff]

I've personally seen failures proximate to and triggered by a hardware upgrade or a hardware reconfiguration, and I've seen failures related to an upgrade or a change only by onset time. This on VAX, on Alpha, on Integrity, and on IA-32 and Intel 64 iron. Old VAX iron and PDP-11 iron was notorious for interconnected failures; anybody that's worked on that can remember swapping boards around to find a matched set of memory modules and slots, for instance. (Shudder.)

It's also possible to mechanically damage various gear during the repairs. Things do sometimes get bumped.

Follow the troubleshooting sequence for the particular failing component. This may well involve re-seating various boards, and potentially the mechanical reseating of or the replacement of the processor or processor module.

Conductive metal filaments can also migrate around from the casing or from a raised floor, and these cases can be difficult to find and to resolve.

If anti-static procedures were not followed during the memory upgrade, do rethink that particular decision.

Short of a root cause analysis for this particular failure, little can be ascertained from what we might know here. What I have posted are simply guesses.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC