PowerEdge 4400 Hanging Randomly!!!! 1

[murraykr]

I have 2 Poweredge 4400 servers that are hanging randomly. I am running NT 4.0 SP 6a. There is no answers or hints in the Event Viewer logs, of course!!! Just wondering if anyone else has had a similar problem with any Poweredge server, and how they fixed the problem.

Thanx in advance.

 

[Tobinsk]

Had a similar problem with a Poweredge 2450 recently. No blue screen, no events logged, just a complete lockup. It turned out to be a faulty DIMM. If you get a chance, it might be worth running the Dell diagnostics on the system, just to see what they return.

 

[mbarlam]

I had compatibility problem with Dual Processors and a bad PERC Card. I would do the 'old' Dell Tech answer and reseat everything you can and reboot. Also, I've been told that SP6 on the Dell Server CD isn't the most recent. Might want to try getting SP6a High Encyption.

 

[DR4G0L3N]

What apps are the servers running ? We have encountered problems with Lotus Notes that forced us to upgrade to W2000 as NT had reached the limit for kernel paged memory (or control table for paged memory) at about 180MB. This was almost a year ago on a compaq server, but it would lock up for no apparent reason and it would do it every few days as it ran out of memory. Hope that helps.

 

[shepherdblake]

All of our Dell 4400's are hanging. Dell's solution is to upgrade to the latest firmware. We did the upgrades and now the problem is worse! Dell is now replacing our motherboards, scsi cables and backplanes on a case by case basis. DELL SUCKS!!

 

[sgraunke]

We also have "LOT's" of 4400 and 4600 servers that are "hanging" randomly. We are working on determining what is causing this as I write this. Most of the servers have been updated to the latest BIOS (A09), ESM (A56) and PERC drivers and firmware (2.7.1). We also run NT 4.0 SP6a.
The symptoms are that the OS is still alive as we can ping the machine, use Alt-TAb to change windows, the focus on the window changes but the process never repaints or updates. Sometimes (rarely) we will get an Event logged by Srv, EventID 2020, stating "The server was unable to allocate from the system paged pool because the pool was empty" (it hurts when you jump into the deep end!!). We also have Compaq and IBM hardware running the same software and they don't seem to exhibit these problems. This also does not appear to be limited to the PE4400 as wel have also seen it on the PE4600. Right now we are suspect of the DELL PERC and the battery levels and reconditioning.

Are you using the PERC3di controller for RAID5?
Have you made anymore headway into determining what your problems are?