Re: Dying net6501 servers

Andrew Atrens <[email protected]> Sun, 28 Feb 2016 14:52:26 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.hardware.soekris.technical
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

> On Feb 27, 2016, at 10:02 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
..

> Mine /just/ died. Tried a second PSU that I know works, and still nada. RLOD
> (Red Light Of Death). It was working, then I changed something and rebooted,
> and it wouldn't boot up.

That’s definitely the failure mode. The annoying thing is that there really aren’t any warning signs - the board will run fine until you need to reboot it for any reason and then ‘toast’.

I don’t want to re-write the Com BIOS, but it’s the BIOS that’s bailing here - the hw lights the RLOD as part of normal bring up, and the BIOS clear it when ready.

If I had to guess I’d say that the BIOS is having trouble initializing the network hardware and that that’s likely due to some init data stored somewhere on the board (eprom, nvram, flash, etc) being less than readable.

A few things that could be tried -

1.  skip the error checking by noop’ing
2.  retrying more aggressively / or more times
3.  storing/managing a second copy of the init data

> So I've replaced it with a VM on another box. It's my
> firewall so I needed something asap that wasn't installed on either of my
> server's host-os installs.
> 
> --
> Thomas Fjellstrom
> [email protected]
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