mork

I'm starting a thread to let people know what's going on with the mork (our boinc DB server) issue.

As most of you know, mork will sometimes hang, requiring a power cycle to boot. There are no footprints as to what causes this. So we strongly suspect hardware.

Mork has a sister machine (mindy, of course) that never really worked (both are donated, used, HW). So mindy is mork's parts machine. This is a little dicey because we don't know why mindy did not work.

The RAM in these machines are arranged on 4 daughter boards. Last week we swapped all four of mindy's identically populated memory boards into mork. But at least one of the "new" sticks was bad because mork then showed differing amounts of memory across subsequent boots.

So we returned mork's original memory and ran the first three memtest tests. They showed no error. The final several tests are very time consuming and we may or may not do them, as mork's OS is down for these tests.

Today, we swapped mindy's two power supplies into mork. This is not because we strongly suspect the power supplies but because this is an easy exercise.

If mork hangs again, we are likely to replace the entire machine. Further component testing is becoming too cumbersome and time consuming. And after all, we now have the funds to do this because your very generous donations (thank you!!!).
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General Tip:

Memtest passing is not the whole story, Memory timing settings being too tight can also cause IO errors that aren't detectable by memtest.

From overclocking experience, sometimes rated timings do not necessarily mean stable.
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What if Fiction was Fact and Fact was Fiction and vice versa?

Thanks for the update. Much appreciated.

Sounds like an experience I had a long time ago with a memory test. Ran it and it said every chip was good. Re-ran and every chip was a failure. Knew right then and there they were all 100% good. Problem was elsewhere but still in the memory circuits. Turned out to be a broken trace on the motherboard.

Agree with cash on hand not worth chasing it down further, but might be worth it after it is replaced to have a box for something else.

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Jeff...
Thanks so much for the update on mork. Best of luck on Friday when you crank back up and he will be heavily stressed again.

Meow meow.
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"Ask not, what your kitty can do for you. Ask what you can do for your kitty."

As it is kitten, so shall it be done.

Jeff...
Thanks so much for the update on mork. Best of luck on Friday when you crank back up and he will be heavily stressed again.

Meow meow.

thank you Jeff, for the update


Best Wishes
Byron

I love weird H/W issues. We were using an old Compaq ProLiant 5500 server at work that was handed down from our IS department. One day it started randomly crashing/rebooting. Sometimes it would be up for a minute or 6-7 days. We tried reinstalling the OS several times, swapping out both of it's redundant PSUs, pulling out each of the 4 CPU & running the system with only 1 at a time, swapping out memory riser boards & RAM dimms, & swapping out SCSI controllers & drives.

Finally after all of that & several months of troubleshooting we gave up. I installed BOINC on the system & let it run to see what would happen. Turns out that it ran 24/7 without crashing/rebooting while BOINC was running the CPUs full tilt. If BOINC was closed the random reboots would start again.

So we left BOINC on and ran it as part of our infrastructure for 15 more months w/o a single issue. Recently I retired it from use as we got some newer more powerful, and MUCH quieter, machines.
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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours

Join the BP6/VP6 User Group today!

Does anyone knows why BOINCstats does not update the score for SETI@home?

With the new servers on the way, I was wondering about our 3 day outage. I am under the impression that 2 of the 3 days are for the The Near-Time Persistency Checker, because it needs exclusive database access. I was wondering if a third database backup could be created and use that as the The Near-Time Persistency Checker database? Log the changes then on the database maintenance day, use a log to make changes to the master database then resynchronize the 3rd DB with the new results from the week. I hope I explained my idea good enough, I am a truck driver and only dabble in computers. I like to assemble components and see if I can make them work.

On edit, I was wondering if Mork is stable enough to take on this role
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With the new servers on the way, I was wondering about our 3 day outage. I am under the impression that 2 of the 3 days are for the The Near-Time Persistency Checker, because it needs exclusive database access. I was wondering if a third database backup could be created and use that as the The Near-Time Persistency Checker database? Log the changes then on the database maintenance day, use a log to make changes to the master database then resynchronize the 3rd DB with the new results from the week. I hope I explained my idea good enough, I am a truck driver and only dabble in computers. I like to assemble components and see if I can make them work.

On edit, I was wondering if Mork is stable enough to take on this role

Just curious to hear from the lab.. do you guys think the bubble gum will hold? Or do you need more black tape?