TC-3100 "Going to sleep"

[Mal Osborne]

Having an ongoing problem with 3 HP TC-3100 servers thinking they are laptops, and going into some sort of "hibernation" mode. When this happens, the server is unresponsive to the keyboard or mouse, and the NIC cannot be pinged. The power light flashed in about a one second 50/50 duty cycle. Sometimes it can be "woken" by a quick prod of the power button. At other time, this causes the server to start it's fans, begin awakening, and go back to sleep in about 10 seconds. In this case, holding the power switch down and forcing a power off is needed.

The event logs show nothing helpful, if the server woke up without a forced power off, there is nothing at all. With a forced power off, the event log looks like it would were the power cable pulled.

All three servers have no out of band management, and everything is genuine HP. In one case, we had HP change a mainboard, this seemed to solve the problem. In another case, swapping the mainboard made no difference. (As the problem is sporadic, I am unsure if the mainboard was ever the issue)

All 3 servers are running Windows2000 (SBS in one case), Trend CSM 3.0, and APC Powerchute.

Any ideas?

Mal Osborne
MCSE MSMVP Mensa