Re: HP ProLiant DL360G3 rebuttal... ;-)

Cagle, John (ISS-Houston) (john.cagle_at_hp.com) wrote: 

Thank you very much for the explanation. That is far more than we got
from HP-Helpdesk. It also explains why downgrading the bios DID help
here (see below).

> Holger Kipp (holger.kipp_at_alogis.com) wrote:
>> I can't comment on 5.x, but I experienced some problems with
>> the latest HP DL360G3, as the bios was changed lately to
>> reduce fan noises, and then a OS-dependant health driver
>> might be needed. Otherwise, the system will overheat and
>> switch off without warning.
>>   A possible solution might be to reactivate fan hardware
>> control (iirc there are some hardware switches) and/or go
>> back to an older Firmware. For the DL 360 G3 we used
>> SP23587.exe (ProLiant DL360 G3 ROM P31 (01/09/2003)) which
>> worked. And don't forget to complain to HP ;-)
>
>
>The HP ProLiant DL360G3 that Holger mentions below has hardware fan
>control enabled by default.  With the latest BIOS version (and without

The latest DL360G3 was delivered with hardware control disabled. So with
the new bios the fan speed will be slow, and without health driver, fan
speed won't be increased, right?
=> that is why the bios downgrade worked. The old bios starts the fans
   with full speed.
=> so it is only necessary to check the switch setting to enable hardware
   fan control.

BTW: about 13% (4 out of 30) of the shipped DL360G3 dual xeon systems
had one heatsink not properly mounted (gave no problems with W2K, but
FreeBSD SMP got ungraceful shutdowns after a few minutes). Remounting
cpu-heatsinks helped :-)

Since then we had not a single failure, and performance is good.

>running a health driver), the hardware will start the fans at low speed
>and will switch them to high speed when a certain temperature (e.g.
>"temp-caution") is reached.  The fans will then run at full speed until
>the server is rebooted.  If the temperature reaches an even higher trip
>point (e.g. "temp-deadly") the server will automatically power off
>(without a graceful shutdown).

Any chance of HP providing a FreeBSD health driver or at least some docu
for a healthd? Sorry, have to ask <g>.

Best regards,
Holger Kipp