[Beowulf] Solved: SATA(?) errors locks up node

[Gebhardt Thomas]

Hello,

thank you all for your advice! 
After a Firmware upgrade (->20.06C06) of the SATA disks we had no
further incident until now. So I'm pretty sure that we have caught the bug.

Thanks again, Th. Gebhardt

On Wednesday 23 May 2007 11:13, Gebhardt Thomas wrote:
> we are running a cluster of 57 dual opteron nodes. Once or twice a week
> one of these nodes gets in an error state and can't connect to the
> I/O-subsystem anymore. I need to reboot that node. As far as I can see,
> the problem occurs randomly at any of our nodes, i.e., the MTBF of a single
> node is about 6-12 months.
>
> I still don't know whether this is a problem of the linux kernel sata
> driver, a hardware problem, a flaw of the disk firmware or something else.
> I'm looking for a possibilty to track down the problem without
> substantially interfering with the jobs on the cluster.
>
> This is our environment:
> TYAN S3992 motherboard with Serverworks HT1000+2000 chipset.
> 2 DualCore Opteron  2216 HE 2.4GHz, 16GByte Mem
> Western Digital 250GByte SATA disk, WDC WD2500YS-01SHB0, firmware rev. 
20.06C03