[cobalt-developers] RAQ XTR SCSI card woes

["Greg Larkin" <glarkin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I hope someone the list can help me out, since I have not been able to get
anything resolved by Tech Support - the standard answer there is "it's not
supported - talk to Pro Services for $200/hr".

I'm now on the 2nd XTR box.  The first one was shipped 5-6 weeks ago and
worked well up until a week ago.  After that, it would not boot and tech
support claimed a hardware failure in the disk controller.  Fine.  Now I
have a second box (which I had to use the OS Restore CD on because files
were missing from the box as shipped from the factory!!!).

I'm at a point where I have a Adaptec PCI SCSI card (29160LP - recommended
by Cobalt) installed and would like to get my tape drive working (Ecrix
rakPak).  This setup worked fine with the first machine until it died.

The SCSI card is not auto-detected at startup, so I have to manually insert
a kernel module that comes with the OS to get it to work - no problem.  The
command I have been using is:

/sbin/modprobe -a aic7xxx

This worked great on the old box.  On the new one, it causes the machine to
crash and reboot!  I have tried many different options to both modprobe and
insmod, as well as various module parameters found in the README.aic7xxx
that lives in /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi.

Unfortunately, no kernel panic messages show up in the syslog or anywhere
that I can find.  No messages show up on the serial console port.

- Does anyone have an idea why the new box would crash on the command above
when the old one didn't?  Any idea how to fix the problem?

I'm at the point where I'm ready to return these machines back to
Cobalt and advise the client to go with either a Dell 1U server or a VA
Linux box.  A big selling point for Cobalt was the "easy" admin GUI for the
client to administer the box, but I have to question the reliability of the
hardware and commitment of the organization to make things right.

Sincerely,
Greg Larkin