Re: jerks

[Glenn English <ghe@slsware.com>]

On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 10:54 -0600, Gnu-Raiz wrote:

> When I first seen this subject line I thought you were
> calling the list a bunch of Jerks! My bad!

Just a few of them :-)

> Have you tried a livecd, 

No, but I will. That's a good idea. 

> it almost sounds like a hardware
> problem? 

Yes, it does. But a friend of mine has another one with the identical
problem. That makes it begin to sound like a design problem...

> Did it run like it should under it's former OS?

There was none -- it came in the door, and Debian went on it. I tried it
with DeMuDi (2.4, i386 kernel); same problem. 

> I would really look at the logs, as suggested make sure that
> smp is working. 

I just grepped -i messages* for smp. It says it's configuring SMP from
ACPI. I didn't see anything about SMP actually doing anything. What
should I look for?

> Also it might be a good idea to make sure
> your drives are working at the proper DMA settings. 

My normal config uses a SCSI system drive and a pair of SATAs, all
running from mobo controller chips. I've tried disabling all of them in
the BIOS and installing and running with an IDE. Same thing.

I don't know how to check for DMA on the SCSI drive, but I can't imagine
anybody running SCSI without DMA.

> Are you
> using the proper arch? 

If the proper arch is AMD64, I am.

> Just because you buy Sun, and it uses
> AMD Opteron's doesn't mean it's a spark.

I wasn't really expecting that, but sometimes engineers used to doing
good work have a hard time turning out a turkey. OTOH, there was a rule
of thumb, back in the 70's: "Never buy anything from CDC that costs less
than $50,000" :-)

It was way on sale at the beginning of the summer, and it sorta kinda
looks like Sun is heading in ou direction, so I thought I'd look into
it. It's a nice enough machine, with some cute features, but the jerks
(computer, not human) are making me crazy...

-- 
Glenn English
ghe@slsware.com
GPG ID: D0D7FF20