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DL185 G5 (Lefthand P4500) shutting down as soon as NICs are connected

 
witchy
Advisor

DL185 G5 (Lefthand P4500) shutting down as soon as NICs are connected

Hi folks,

This is an oddity I've never seen in all my years of working with Proliants. I had a site this week with a downed P4500 G1. It wouldn't power up with the button and if power was removed/replaced it would power up for the briefest of seconds. I replaced the PSUs with the same result.

Pulling it out of the rack I changed the DC distribution module and the server powered up - result. Back in the rack with all cables connected and.....nothing. Basically it worked out of the rack but not in it.

Long story short I ran it ok in the rack with only power connected and it died as soon as I plugged in NIC1. Remove cable and power was restored. I found an 8 port Netgear switch and plugged into that with nothing else connected - power fluctuated, up and down repeatedly. Connect up NIC2 (the non-shared one) and I watched it autonegotiate to 100Mb and the power came on.

This means the server's gigabit networking was taking the whole box down but 100Mb was fine.

Anyone seen this before? I'm expecting tumbleweeds :)

W

4 REPLIES 4
Suman_1978
HPE Pro

Re: DL185 G5 (Lefthand P4500) shutting down as soon as NICs are connected

Hi,

Not sure why the Gigabit port/card is doing so, but it could be because of these reasons (I think):

Network cable is faulty or unsupported.
Network port is faulty or is causing Short.

Have you tried the following?
Update Network Card Firmware.
Clear NVRAM from System Maintenance Swritch.

Thank You!
I am a HPE employee
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witchy
Advisor

Re: DL185 G5 (Lefthand P4500) shutting down as soon as NICs are connected

Hi,

I wondered if it was the network cable but out of the rack I used a new 0.5m cable with an unmanaged gigabit switch and still had the same problem. In the lab on the bench I plugged it into the workshop network using a 3rd cable and got the same problem. What was interesting was it would power up at 100Mb/s but not Gigabit.

No bent pins in the sockets either. I could only assume a short in the Gigabit side of things.

This node was so old there weren't any later firmware updates, it's a P4500 G1 running San/IQ 9.5. New motherboard fitted and new feature key requested. I was just curious to see if anyone else had seen this before.

Cheers

Witchy

Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: DL185 G5 (Lefthand P4500) shutting down as soon as NICs are connected

Have seen this before, it was a voltage problem on the systemboard (bad capacitors?).

go into BIOS, watch voltages (3.3V) and connect the cable - probably 3.3 goes below 2.8V.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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witchy
Advisor

Re: DL185 G5 (Lefthand P4500) shutting down as soon as NICs are connected

Hi Torsten,

I couldn't - it was an instant off as soon as the NIC was connected, obviously as soon as the cable was removed the server powered up again. I did check the electrolytics for bulging but if it's one of the can types that's gone we can't tell.

Cheers

Witchy