I suspect I already know the answer to this, which is that the trouble I
am having is nothing to do with the OS at all, but I have to ask,
because I am otherwise up against a total brick wall!
I bought a second-hand Dell Poweredge 4600 and installed FreeBSD 6.2
earlier this year. I had it set up with RAID5 using its PERC3/DC
controller, with 7 x 73GB disks (+ 1 hot spare). So far so good, and it
worked faultlessly as a Samba server for several months.
At the beginning of October, it went down, reporting a mismatch between
the configuration on the NVRAM and the disks. With help from Dell
support, I managed to recreate the RAID array and it worked again for a
month.
In early November it happened again, and has kept happening since. At
one point it appeared that the backplane was faulty, so I replaced that,
but I cannot keep the server up for more than a day or so without this
'mismatch' poblem.
What about diagnostics on the hardware you may ask? I have run all the
diagnostic tools that Dell can supply - several times - and the server
declares itself to be totally fault-free.
My specific questions therefore:
Is there any way at all that FreeBSD could be invloved with this
problem? (I did notice for example that the Dell PERC3/DC controller was
not in the list of supported hardware - but then again, why did it work
for several months?)
Can I use FreeBSD to tell me anything about the fault that Dell's
diagnostic tools haven't found?
(I do hope someone might be able to help - Dell are trying to get me to
switch to a 'supported' OS!)
Thanks
Barnaby Scott
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