Bootable burn in tester?

T

toast0

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 26, 2010
Messages
3,163
Anybody have recomendations for a CD image to boot to test a machine? I've got a managed server that's rebooting itself, and trying to figure out why, because the cut rate host doesn't want to swap the hardware.

Memtest86 doesn't show any memory issues; no IPMI logs from the incidents, restart_cause doesn't change. It's rebooted when FreeBSD is running, when FreeBSD is at the disk encryption prompt in early boot before the kernel loads, it even rebooted while running memtest86 once. Nothing usable on the serial console, IPMI KVM just goes blank and then shows the supermicro logo, etc.

Running dual Xeon L5640, so it's super old, but still, it should work fine. Had a fair number of restarts at the end of July, but I suspected things, and did work on getting kernel core dumps to happen, etc, it ran fine through august and september, but rebooted once last week and then tons of times in the last 24 hours.
 
You can try Puppy Linux boot it. I'd go straight for memory and mobo, as they can and will cause those random reboots. Memtest may fail in finding random glitches, so, I'd try to first change memory modules and, should the problem continue, the motherboard will likely be the culprit.
 
Yeah, puppy reboots too. Cut rate hoster is suggesting my software may be too demanding :banghead: I'm pretty sure a linux livecd without network configured isn't too demanding, but I dunno.

It wouldn't be too much more to get even more overkill of a server, but at the same time, I already bumped my spending a lot from a $5/month VPS to get a dedicated server.
 
It's something SuperMicro, maybe X8DTT-H, but I'm not 100% sure. SuperMicro has a diagnostic disc ('Super Diagnostics Offline'), but that says it needs their X10 platform (Xeon E5-v3/4) or later, and it doesn't even try to boot that when I have it mounted; quite possibly because it's a UEFI image and the x8 platform seems to be BIOS only. At my last job, I used a ton of SuperMicro X9 and X10 servers, and I don't remember any of them misbehaving like this; they'd pretty much always have an IPMI log when they were being stupid (except when it was like loose power cables cause the servers racked above them were longer and when the site tech put those in they bumped the cables... that happened way more than it should have :/)
 
Yay --- they installed Debian last night, and it rebooted at least 14 times between 8 am and 9 am, so they're going to give me a different server. Which hopefully runs better.
 
The new server does seem to be running better; especially since they gave me an upgraded server at no additional cost. Woo!
 
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