problem starting new Blade 150
Has anyone seen and have ideas about the following problem. We had a Blade 150 running Solaris 5.8. Once in a while when we would start the boot process by clicking the power button on the Blade, it would light, beep and so forth as normal but the video screen would never become active, meaning the display would stay black and its connection identifying led would stay amber (not go green as when connection is established). This would happen intermittently meaning sometimes it would boot normally (with full video) and other times sit at this black screen... Eventually the problem got worse and troubleshooting could not find the issue so we eventually replaced the machine (it was under a third party warranty)... This new machine boots normally most of the time but only recently has started sporadically doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING... We are looking into power related issues but so far have found nothing... Has anyone seen this behavior with Blade 150's or any other SUN workstation? Can anyone offer any suggestions? Any help would be appreciated... thanks.. bob..
[1092 byte] By [
diitto] at [2007-11-25 23:06:23]
# 1
Hello.
Sounds like there is no VSync signal (I have the same symptoms with my Elite-3D-Card which generates a CSync signal instead of a HSync/VSync signal when booting up).
Perhaps your display is auto-detected as CSync capable display.
Because this problem does not occur everytime you start your Blade the reason might be a loose contact in the display cable.
Martin
# 2
How do you customarily shut the system down?
I hope you're not just pushing that same button !
At the very least, you should completely exit out of any GUI, but it would be best to use one of the many Solaris OS commands to bring the system down.Explore the man pages for init or shutdown.
If you're just pushing the button, you've possible corrupted the Solaris filesystems, thus getting boot problems.You wouldn't do that to a computer running Microsoft's OS.Same consideration for a Sun OS.
# 3
Hi... You asked about how I shut down the machine... I personally open an xterm, get into super user mode and do an "INIT 5" command which shuts the machine down completely and I think cleanly... What my technicians do which I believe is also approved (but tell me if you think this is wrong) is do a Halt from the particular GUI we run and after the system goes through a number of automatic steps, including syncing the file system, the system comes to the ok prompt... Now from THAT point, we were told we could use the power button to shut off the machine...And that is what my guys do... Could that be the problem? So bottom line is, I use INIT 5 from a superuser xterm and most other folks who use this machine do a HALT and then a power down (with the button) from the OK prompt... Your thoughts on this would be much appreciated...
thanks... bob..
# 4
Whew !!
Those shutdown methods are fine, but you never know !!
That's why I asked.I've seen end-users do some hideous things and then stand there and say "why would <i>that</i> be the problem?"
OK.Time to review some basics on the system setup.
Next time it's booted, run two commands and get back to us with the results.Each command will produce a single line of output that you can paste back in here.As superuser, do ...
prtconf -V(uppercase V)
uname -a(lowercase)
... and can you recall whether there's any job-specific third party hardware installed into or attached onto the computer?
# 5
OK, per your request I got into superuser mode and performed the commands you suggested.
prtconf -Vreturned the following...
OBP 4.10.6 2003/06/06 12:30
and uname -areturned the following...
SunOS machinename 5.8 Generic_108528-22 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-100
where I replaced the actual machine name with machinename in the above line...
What does this tell you?
thanks... bob..
# 6
The information from those two commands describe the systemboard firmware revision as well as the Solaris kernel patch level.
OBP 4.10.6 is from two years ago, and there have been at least four major firmware updates in that time.Each update fixed dozens to tens-of-dozens of bugs.
The README file from the currently available OS-independant firmware patch <a href="http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/advsearch.do?colle ction=PATCH&type=collections&queryKey5=119235&toDocument =yes" target="_blank"> SB100/150 OBP patch 119235-01</a> includes these as a couple of the bugs it addresses ...
"panic or fatal reset during resume"
"stand-init interact breaks boot"
.... never mind what may have been addressed in the interim two years of updates that are not on your computer's systemboard.
Next, the Solaris kernel patch is also more than two years' unpatched.There are so many issues addressed that it's likely that the only way to get current would be to have a Full Recommended Solaris 8 Cluster be applied.
Your current patch levels, both firmware and software are not <i>`bad`</i>, but they certainly could be better.
Time to make a call to that 3rd party support organization?
