DL365 Intermittently hanging on startup

[cb_24]

New DL365 G1 servers

When booting\restarting they intermittently hang when it gets upto
"Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet Boot Agent v.28.5" on the post.
It stays on that until you press any key and it continues to boot fine.
This only happens sometimes, sometimes it will startup normally.

Seen this before?

[Matthew Dreher]

Has anybody come up with any resolutions on this? I am having the same problem on multiple Dl365 G1's.

[Jeff Nidd]

Did you ever get this issue resolved? I am having the same issue on a few of my new DL365 machines.

[Matthew Dreher]

We are trying the 8.0 Firmware CD and the 1.50 ILO Firmware update to see if it helps resolve the issue. So far so good, but it seems that this problem only appears when we reboot and we don't reboot that often.

[Jeff Nidd]

Thanks for the update. Yes I am in the same boat that the servers are not rebooted on a regular bais so it is hard to trouble shoot the problem and they are in different cities. Of the 15 new servers I have deployed this is only having only four machines.

[juan quesada]

Hi,

Your NIC's are HP NC371i Integrated PCI-X Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter

FYI latest FW CD is 8.10, so this FW is not include as part of it.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=3660114&prodNameId=3660139&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=8&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-0a974a22a88f41379bc895116c

Can you please try this FW? also what happens if you boot without LAN cables? it hangs?
Have you change any setting in the RBSU for the NIC's? or the NIC BIOS ? (Ctrl S)

Regards,

[Matthew Dreher]

I have disabled the "Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet Boot Agent v.28.5" and I still have the issue. It seems that it hangs after the point where the Ethernet Boot Agent appears but before you would get into the System Bios screen. I am currently working through some tests with HP to determine what this issue is and resolve it.

[juan quesada]

Hi,

good, I guess they asked you for the .cap file,
can you please go to run an type
hpnetsvy >report.txt
go to c drive and attach the file

thanks

[Matthew Dreher]

I cannot at this time as I am currently working through the Official request from HP. The machine is currently failing at this point and I am going through unplugging each cable, waiting 5 minutes, plugging in the new cable in different circumstances to see what makes it work. I know that if we unplug all the cables for 5 minutes the machine will start working once plugged back in.

[Dave Bissegger]

I have run into this situation twice before. In both cases, the issue was related to the KVM to which the server was connected. For some reason, when another host was selected on the KVM and the server in question is rebooted, it halts after the Netxteme boot agent prompt. To "resolve" the immediate issue, selecting the halted server and hitting "Enter" would allow the boot to proceed.

It seems there may be some issue with keyboard emulation with certain KVMs and the current generation of Proliants. I would hope that HP would allow keyboardless operation and kbd signal wasn't necessary for successful boot, but this is where I am now. I have yet to find a permanent solution, besides moving the server to another KVM.

[Matthew Dreher]

It would seem that this is a very similar problem but the server would not proceed with the steps you specified. I was finally able to find that unplugging the network cables for about 5 minutes and then plugging them back in would work. Worse case, unplugging all cables from the server and letting it sit for 5 minutes would work as well. I have been dealing with HP techs and I think we finally came up with a real solution for the issue. It would seem that the Firmware CD that I was using v8.1 was not updating the BIOS firmware to the latest revision. I am not sure if the CD has the latest firmware version on it for the BIOS, but I do know that the firmware version was over a year old. I had just assumed it was updating properly. After applying the BIOS Firmware 2008.03.27 (A) 9 Apr 2008, It seems to have resolved the issues. If anybody else is having this problem, you may need to update the BIOS firmware manually and ignore the Firmware CD as it seems to not work in this case.

[juan quesada]

thank you for sharing your knowledge with us