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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Holger Kipp [mailto:Holger.Kipp_at_alogis.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 2:53 AM
> To: Cagle, John (ISS-Houston); Holger.Kipp_at_alogis.com; 
> david_at_landgren.net; freebsd-current_at_freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: HP ProLiant DL360G3 rebuttal... ;-)
> 
> Cagle, John (ISS-Houston) (john.cagle_at_hp.com) wrote: 
> 
> > 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.

That is not quite right.  Let me try to clarify this:

With the new BIOS, hardware fan control will start the fans at a slow
speed, and will increase the fan speed (in one step) to high when a
critical temperature is reached.  You do not need the health driver for
this to occur.  With hardware fan control disabled, the fans will start
at the high speed at boot and will never run slower.

> 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 :-)

Thanks for letting me know about this.  I will forward this data to our
quality team.  It sounds like an assembly line problem - I'll bet it was
CPU #2 that was not properly installed.

Thanks,
John