[rescue] U5 PCI riser

[Phil Stracchino]

Lionel Peterson wrote:
>  On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at  6:16 AM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
>> After we took a power hit yesterday, I had considerable trouble 
>> getting my firewall U5 back up.  It would only boot on every second to 
>> third power-on attempt, I had to replace one of the NICs, swap out the 
>> PCI riser from another machine that's not using its PCI slots, and 
>> still had to move the other NIC to a different PCI slot.
>>
>> Does the U5's PCI riser have a rep for being troublesome in this fashion?
> 
> Define power hit please - what else was hit/died? Was the system on a 
> surge protector? (I ask becuase I'm in the process of building a 
> "proper" data center in my basement and I'm currently thinking about 
> power issues (as the first logical step after network connectivitiy).

All the servers are on a UPS.  But we totally lost power and I couldn't 
get a machine with a head up to shut the servers down cleanly, so all I 
could do was hope the power came back on before the UPS died.  (It didn't.)

> Luckily the U5 is a low-cost item, so replacing them with a cold spare 
> is not a big deal, but I am suprised the PCI riser/PCI NIC were impacted 
> from a power line hit (I would have assumed the MB would have sacrificed 
> itself and spared the PCI cards, memory and HDs. I guess the reality is 
> the riser is wired directly to the PS, and when the PS died, it took out 
> the riser.

I was a little surprised myself, but I'm not *totally* certain the 
riser's bad.  It was one of the things I tried swapping out to get the 
network interfaces working again.

> Were it me, I'd question the remaining life of the U5 chassis and 
> consider swapping it out with another one. If you don't have another 
> one, I can send you one for actual shipping cost. If interested, contact 
> me off-list.

Yeah, I have my doubts about the chassis given the difficulty I had 
powering it back up.


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2         ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
   alaric at caerllewys.net            alaric at metrocast.net
           It's not the years, it's the mileage.