RE: kernel: aacraid: Host adapter reset request. SCSI hang ?

Members of the list may be interested to know our experiences with
PE2650s/disk issues.

We bought 2 2650s at the end of last year. One of them runs CPU-intensive
applications, with little disk access; the other runs CPU and (heavily)
disk intensive applications: the disk is being hammered constantly (reads
and writes).

The machines run Debian with kernel 2.4.20/hyperthreading and the aacraid
driver from the standard kernel distribution.

We started to see problems of the same sort reported here on the
disk-intensive machine: 'SCSI hang', 'aacraid: timeout on <x> commands',
etc.

At various junctures, we've had two of the four disks in the
machine replaced by Dell. Whether it was really the disks at fault is
debatable, but it could have been related to this issue:

http://www.digitimes.com/NewsShow/Article1.asp?datePublish=2003/05/26&pages=01&seq=2

(We had Seagate drives in the machine originally.)

Dell advised us to install the latest BIOS/backplane firmware upgrades;
the Dell support engineer I spoke to seemed to suggest that the machines
couldn't really be considered usable unless these were installed!

After replacement of the disks, and installing these updates, we haven't
seen any disk errors in two months of continuous operation. I strongly
advise people having these problems to install the updates. They're
available in a single 'magic bullet' file - search Dell downloads for
"BR57110.exe".

Dell themselves seem sufficiently concerned about this to have cold-called
everyone who bought these machines last year - they called us to instruct
us to install the updates (after we'd already done so).

I hope this is useful!
____________________________________
Adam Newby
IT Manager
NewsNow Publishing Limited
Tel: +44 (0)20 7471 0400
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http://www.NewsNow.co.uk
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