I recently had to put Debian testing (Squeeze) on an old Dell PowerEdge 1650 server. Here's a little tip to save you some time if your ever in the same situation: upgrade the BIOS first!Its kind of a long story but my original PE1650 was running BIOS A10 when it died due to memory slot failure. So I borrowed a friend's unused PE1650 until I could get a "new" one on-site. Well, the new one was even older than mine and was running BIOS A05. I didn't think it was a big deal and installed Lenny (stable) and then upgraded to Squeeze (testing). And then the problems began. Let's just say that I spent a week of sleepless nights and frustrating days trying to figure out why the machine would just suddenly, and without any notice at all, freeze. And it wasn't your normal hang either as there was no kernel panic messages, no messages in the syslog, not even anything on the console.
I upgraded the BIOS to A11 (the latest available) and rebooted the machine; its been running now for almost 12 hours. This post may be a little premature as I've thought the problem was solved several times before, but everything was pointing to a hardware failure and the BIOS qualifies as hardware in my book. Regardless, I am still a little gun shy and will feel much better when it stays running for at least a whole day. A week would be better. :)
I arrived here through Debian News; thanks for the fun article!
ReplyDeleteThis post reminds me of a similar situation I had a few weeks ago, with a system slightly older than yours. It's an Intel N440BX, which supports two Pentium II processors and up to 1 GB of PC100 ECC RAM.
I pulled it out of the closet and decided to get some upgrades off eBay for it: two new 400 MHz processors (the old ones were 266MHz) and 1 GB of RAM (it previously had 128 MB). It turned out that the old BIOS didn't support processors over 300 MHz or RAM quantities over 512 MB!
To add insult to injury, Intel's BIOS flash program, which they, fortunately, still have available on the web, absolutely had to be run off a floppy disk. I scrounged around for a floppy drive, rigged up a floppy power connector for my desktop computer, imaged the disk in FreeDOS or DOSBox or something, moved the drive to the N440BX, booted up, flashed the BIOS, and at long last, everything worked just fine.
That experience helped me re-realize just how far we've come in the 10 years since the N440BX was on the market. I'm glad for it, but it makes dealing with older hardware that much more of a pain!