all things cbl

So yeah.  I help manage and operate the servers for a company called Instaproofs.  They have a couple of servers and seem to be growing quite a bit. So we ended up ordering a dual woodcrest processor (5150’s) in a 1U supermicro case from Genstor.

The server arrived after some delays because of shortages of processors (probably thanks to Apple’s hording them for the MacPro).  All seemed well upon installation, compilation and building of the new FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE OS/kernel. Running the amd64 (no more i386 for me!) line to take advantage of the 64-bit-ness of the woodcrest chips.  Dual Cores, Dual Procs = 4 processors.. add in hyperthreading fun and it  shows up as 8!

Unfortunately, when I tried copying files onto the server via SSH my SSH process on the sending server kept erroring out at random times. Same thing from another server.  Ugh.  The next day running memtest showed some errors.  After getting a new set of 4×512MB dimms installed, I kept seeing the same problems with SSH copying as well as memtest.

So, I’m shipping the server back to Genstor so they can determine where the problem lies.. CPU or Motherboard.  Hopefully they’ll be able to fix it quick and get it back to me.

So, the box is fast.. when it works right.  I hope that we’ll be able to use it again soon without all the errors..  It sure is nice. 4 drives in a 1U, with that much CPU power.. wow.  Probably can take up to 32GB of ram too..  oh, and did I mention it has dual power supplies? all in 1U.. go supermicro.