Mystery ASR

[Ayman Altounji]

Hello all,

I have been trying (with little success) to determine the cause of repeated ASR resets. Here is the configuration info:
Proliant 1600R, PIII-550, 512MB RAM, SmartArray 431, SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 Enterprise with patches rs505a, oss497c, oss621b, oss600a, oss471f. EFS 5.40a

At seemingly random times the ASR will detect a lockup and reset the server after an interval. The problem is the ASR is not recording any reason why the lockup occurred. It seems to happen at any time, regardless of load on the system, IO operations, whatever. And we can go for a couple of weeks with everything working fine, then have three resets over the course of four days.

I am somewhat limited in my ability to do any heavy testing, as the system is live and on-site. Any troubleshooting would have to be as unobtrusive as possible.

We have systems deployed elsewhere with the same configuration that operate flawlessly. This leads me to believe that the problem is hardware related, but if so shouldn't the ASR log some sort of cause for the lockup?

One other possibility that I can think of is the rather convoluted initial installation of the EFS. I was quite pleased to have a new version of Smart Start to conduct the installation, only to find that it didn't work at all. I had to use a previous version of Smart Start in order to conduct the installation. It installed EFS v5.38, which I then upgraded to 5.40a. Could this have somehow corrupted the drivers, or mixed versions?

Any help at all resolving this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
TF

[Ayman Altounji]

Hi TF

the first this to try is to boot into the System configuraion utility by hitting F10 while the server is booting up. If you dont have it installed you can download it http://www.compaq.com/support/files/server/us/download/13227.html.
If you suspect that it is a software issue then disable software error recovery
If the server still resets itself then it is a harware issue.