Re: [cobalt-users] Is the RaQ XTR now worth buying???

[Chuck Rock <carock@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We  bought an XTR from a guy on E-bay. IT's been working fine once we
figured out the shipping was the greatest trauma to the machine.

It has 3 30 Gig drives, and they all worked (mostly) the first time we
booted up. I configured it as RAID 5, and it proceeded to take about 2
hours to format the drives. Once that was all done, I kept seeing DMA
errors in the log. No mention on Sun's sites, or anywhere pertaining to
any Cobalt, but looking under Linux, I found the errors. It appeared to
have a bad driver. I later found out this was wrong. One of our other sys
admins physically moved the machine from a cart to a rack without powering
down, and then the machine locked up. After trying different things, the
olny thing left to do was unplug it, and turn it back on. Before I did
that, I noticed the power button kept flashing. A little checking in the
docs of a RaQ4 (not XTR), and it looks like the machine was having a
problem with the RAID controller. 

I took the cover off, and reseated all the drives, and unplugged the RAID
card and plugged it back in making sure it was in all the way. I noticed
the drives don't actually lock in the cage, they are just a tight fit. Bad
Sun! The drives should lock in place!

After that little adjustment I made, the machine booted back up, and spent
another 2 hours fixing the RAID, (before boot finished), then everything
was back to normal. No more error about DMA, no issues whatsoever.

I think it would be reall funny if all the problems they had before were
from not locking the drives into the chassis, but who knows.

Anyway we have about a dozen sites on  it, it's running mostly Mojo mail,
and UBB message boards for a couple of domains. The scripts should load it
up pretty good, and I've not seen or heard of any problems. It's been up
for 9 days without a hickup. 

My biggest problem is, I use FreeBSD, and this runs RedHat. I don't know
how the Linux world works yet, so all these problems on
BugTraq with vulnerabilities in zlib, PHP, Cobalt interface, etc. I have
yet to see any patches available from the BlueLinQ on the Cobalt XTR
itself. This worries me a little.

the only other issue I had was support. I tried ordering a restore CD, and
the lady on the other end of the phone said this product was discontinued,
and there was a recall. She created a troub le ticket, and put me on the
phone with a tech who laughed and said that her system should not say that
anymore.

Otherwise a pretty good experience for buying a used sewrver from E-bay,
and never seeing one before with no knowledge of RedHat.

Chuck Rock
EPC

On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, James Dean Young wrote:

> >>  Can anyone let me know if the XTR is a good buy? Is the RaQ4r a better buy?
> >
> >The XTR is about twice the price of a RaQ4, so you decide <smile>.
> 
> I guess I should have said money is no object. If it can stay up 
> without crashing like the old ones, and if I can do everything I can 
> do on my RaQs, like install the packages from sourceforge and 
> neomail, then it would be worth it to me.
> 
> >>  Does the raid set up even WORK? Has anyone ever hot swapped a drive in it?
> >
> >XTRs?  Or RaQ4r?  The RaQ4r does not have hotswap capability.  The Raid
> >works fine, at least for us.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had swapped a disk on the XTR. How does the 
> raid work on a raq4? Does it just take over when the other goes down? 
> Does the software (makes me cringe to say that) RAID use a lot of 
> resources? Is the XTR a HARD RAID?
> -- 
> 
> -
>       James Dean Young
>   http://www.sundream.com/~jd
> 
> "Sometimes you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you 
> look at it right"
>     - Robert Hunter
> 
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