Hello, scar a écrit :
hi i have an Ultra-5 which has been housed in a datacenter for several years. It used to be running SunOS 5.9 and i didn't experience any problems with it. As that OS became obsolete, I installed Wheezy on the box not too long ago but now am experiencing hard freezes with no info in the system log as to what is happening. how can i troubleshoot? is it a software/OS/kernel issue? i did a barebones installation, not selecting any "roles" for the computer and have installed all software as needed (mainly openssh server), so it is a very slim installation. is it a recent hardware failure? how can i test RAM and other hardware, for example?
You can use diag_switch? = true and diag_level = max (with a null modem serial line). You can also use SunVTS from Solaris. I have some trouble with all my U5 memory modules (until I use compatibles modules, not Sun branded ones). And UltraSPARC IIi/440 MHz seems to be fragile.
BUT : for several months, Linux/Sparc64 is unfortunately not stable anymore (or completely broken). After 2.6.35 kernel, I can see random deadlock on all my sparc64 (sun4v _and_ sun4u). Now, I run NetBSD or Solaris 10. But FreeBSD and OpenBSD run fine also.
If you want to help to continue linux/sparc64 port, you're welcome. But if you want to use your workstation, I think you have to forget Linux...
Regards, JKB