freebsd stable - Aug 2010 - My kernel panics sucked, but they seem to be gone now.

A rehash of the problem:

If my computer was plugged into the UPS and sitting on my metal desk
the drive controllers would fail and cause a panic almost immediately
when booted.  If my computer was plugged into wall power and sitting
on a wooden table, the machine ran flawlessly.

New information:

Removing the UPS, but leaving the computer on the metal desk make the
panics happen a lot less, about every four to seven days.  Sometimes
after a crash it couldn't boot because no hard drives could be found
at all, but that always went away with a few power cycles.

One of my SATA cards has been with me since 2005.  It was a rock solid
card on my old FreBSD install...as long as I didn't plug anything into
SATA port 2.  I always had this feeling that something wasn't quite
right with port 2 and that I should avoid it.  But I'm running FreeBSD
8 now, and having strange problems.  So I removed the card completely
and my system hasn't crashed since.  Which still doesn't prove it was
the card.  Removing the card could just have made it even more
intermittent.

In summary: I hate hardware almost as much as I hate linux.

-- 
-- Schlake

Hi,

On 13 Aug 2010, at 04:33, William D. Colburn (Schlake) wrote:
> A rehash of the problem:
> 
> If my computer was plugged into the UPS and sitting on my metal desk
> the drive controllers would fail and cause a panic almost immediately
> when booted.  If my computer was plugged into wall power and sitting
> on a wooden table, the machine ran flawlessly.
> 
> New information:
> 
> Removing the UPS, but leaving the computer on the metal desk make the
> panics happen a lot less, about every four to seven days.  Sometimes
> after a crash it couldn't boot because no hard drives could be found
> at all, but that always went away with a few power cycles.
Is your metal desk earthed?
> One of my SATA cards has been with me since 2005.  It was a rock solid
> card on my old FreBSD install...as long as I didn't plug anything into
> SATA port 2.  I always had this feeling that something wasn't quite
> right with port 2 and that I should avoid it.  But I'm running FreeBSD
> 8 now, and having strange problems.  So I removed the card completely
> and my system hasn't crashed since.  Which still doesn't prove it
was
> the card.  Removing the card could just have made it even more
> intermittent.
> 
> In summary: I hate hardware almost as much as I hate linux.
:-)
> -- 
> -- Schlake
--
Bob Bishop
rb@gid.co.uk