Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 10:49:55 +0100 From: Olaf Greve <ogreve@millennics.com> To: ray@redshift.com Cc: amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Yikes! Dire trouble with 9500S-4 installation :((( Message-ID: <438AD2C3.6090806@millennics.com> In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20051125114640.00a5d2f8@pop.redshift.com> References: <3.0.1.32.20051125041044.00a47720@pop.redshift.com> <3.0.1.32.20051121055411.00aa1490@pop.redshift.com> <20051119200222.V2029@roble.com> <20051119120051.39BE216A41F@hub.freebsd.org> <20051119200222.V2029@roble.com> <3.0.1.32.20051121055411.00aa1490@pop.redshift.com> <3.0.1.32.20051125041044.00a47720@pop.redshift.com> <3.0.1.32.20051125114640.00a5d2f8@pop.redshift.com>
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Hi all, Firstly: thanks a lot for all your replies, they were actually very helpful in deciding what to install, and I'll get back to them a bit further ahead in this message... However, unfortunately, last weekend Murphy struck, correction, he struck raised to the power of three. :( Firstly, we were hit by a blizzard over here on Friday, effectively knocking out most roads, and hence depriving Versatel of the means to install the new ADSL modem at our home. So, off to a bad start, I have been Internet-less at home as of last Wednesday, and it will not be before tomorrow that they'll install it. Furthermore, due to the same reason, the machine could not be delivered to my home on Friday. Secondly, on Saturday, the client and I made a brave effort to force luck our way by going to the site where the machine is at (not exactly straightforward due to the snow). When we were finally there, we could at least get some hands-on work done. A nice surprise for me was that the guy who normally assembles the machines was ill, so the client worked on that, while I read through the various messages regarding the 9500S-4 + FreeBSD 5.4 vs. 6, etc. When that was done, I had a strategy set out (FreeBSD 6.0 + MySQL 4.1.x built from the ports), and gave the client some help in assembling the machine. Once that was out of the way, I booted up the machine, configured the RAID 10 array as I would on any RAID controller (no surprises there), and then I decided to give FreeBSD 6 a go (I actually agree with Ray on preferring to stick with "non .0" versions, but given the other messages I gather that FreeBSD 6.0 has actually already been pounded on a lot). Surprise, surprise, stuff did not work as expected. Firstly, FreeBSD choked on the Gigabit NICs we had installed, and then on the RAID controller. I tried various things, removed the NICs, verified the RAID array from the controller's BIOS itself (checked out all ok), tried the various different settings with enabling/disabling the write cache etc., tried it with FreeBSD 5.4 and all to no avail. :(((( Very frustrating. To compound matters, it started to snow heavily again, so we had to dig the car out and head back for our living places. We decided to leave the machine at the client's site as we didn't want to risk it getting damaged and I didn't have Internet at home anyway. Nowwwww, does anyone have any ideas what could be wrong? To give a bit more detail, the machine has an Asus motherboard with 939 socket (dunno the number from memory (but if deemed relevant I can request it), but it's something like the K8N or A8N or so), and the processor is an Athlon dual core 4400. The 9500S-4 is installed in a normal 32-bit PCI slot, and I cannot see any hardware errors (FreeBSD recognises it as well), and the RAID verification went fine (though of course there is no data yet on the drives). The drives are Maxtor drives of 189Gb each (dunno the exact type number) and they were recognised properly by the controller. Yet, upon booting, it is very weird that the NICs (or at least one of them) and the 9500S-4 all gave trouble, especially since all of them are brand new. I _think_ we didn't make any errors in the assembly of the machine, but given the trouble I cannot be 100% sure. The errors given by FreeBSD 5.4 and 6 all seem to be related to the twa interrupt handler (I hope I identified that correctly). I didn't write down the very error messages, but I did Google them when I was over there and the only hits I found were basically the various sources of the driver. By doing a Google search just now, I found one such example at (note: this may not be the very driver that 5.4 or 6 uses, but it should indicate the same source of error): http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/twa/tw_cl_intr.c The types of errors I saw passing by were things like: "Failed to fetch AEN" "Response queue empty" "Unposted command completed" I _think_ I've seen the first two, and I've definitely seen that last error message. When doing a more general search on these issues in Google using the terms "3ware freebsd twa interrupt", I found several more people who've had issues, but none of them sound like te very thing that happened to me. The nasty thing is that this goes wrong already upon booting from the installation CD and once FreeBSD enters sysinstall, it doesn't find any drives, so there's no chance for me to first install it and then fix the driver or so... Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated.... Cheers, and thanks a lot in advance! Olafo PS: I didn't try booting in any other mode than the default one; perhaps one of the other modes works better???
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