DELL 2900 and OpenVox - not playing nicely

[John Doe]

Hello to everyone on the forum,

Like everyone else here I'm glad we have this new "system". I've been following NV for a long while now but never took the plunge...untill recently.

I bought a new Dell 2900 server , running a single Quad core Xeon (1.6Ghz) , 4 Mb RAM with hardware Raid 1 using a pair of 15K SCSI hot swappable drives. I also have dual power supplies on board but that will have no bearing on this issue of course.

I have a few OpenVox A1200 cards with 6 FXS ports and 4 FXO ports installed on one of them. I have this card placed into slot 1 on the Dell Motherboard.

I Installed the PiaF ISO. Initially i had problems. I did not get a green prompt and every time i tried to do something i kept getting BASH. I couldn't figure out what was wrong after much reading, so in the end i just re-installed the ISO from scratch. This got me a working green prompt this time around. However this time it seems for some reason , not everything got loaded correctly as i had no Flash operator panel ICON and no FreePBX ICON on the admin page.

About this time after re reading the WHOLE forum (every single post so far) i came across the post by Titanous about the IRC channel for PBX in a Flash. SO i rigged up a client and got onto IRC looking for help. I found Titanous there (i saw darnock pop on and off a few times as well) and he graciously help me sort out what was wrong. I cant say thank you to Titanous enough. The IRC channel for PiaF is a great resource we should all make use of, because the more of us there chatting about issues the better we can all find out lots of stuff we never knew about PiaF.

So on the IRC channel Titanous advised me in the end to just do another reload from scratch. I did and it worked ..sort of. Now i have a brownish red coloured prompt instead of a green one . I have no idea what is going on there ??? However i now have the Flash Operator panel ICON and the FreePBX ICON that were previously missing. I then went thru the whole updating procedure for FreePBX and it all worked fine. Titanous then worked out how to compile the system for the A1200 card, which he did and gave me step by step instructions on how to do this. because it was now well past 1.00am local time i decided to call it quits for the night. I left the server running but i had not tried to connect anything to the card itself yet. This morning when i came in i found the server had locked up and was flashing warning messages at me. The server is locked up and totally unresponsive to any type of command or poking and prodding. I have no choice but to hard power cycle the server.

The error message being displayed (scrolling across a small LCD display on the front of the server) is the following ;

Power Edge 2900 E1711 PCI PERR Slot1 E171F PCIE Fatal ERR B0 D2 F0

The LED color is Orange while displaying this error message. When i first boot up the server and its all working OK the LCD screen color is blue.

The BIOS REV of the server is ; Power Edge 2900 BIOS REV 1.3.7

When the server starts loading its drivers a line comes up stating ;

PERC 5i Intergrated
Fw Package 5.1.1-0040

Thats it.


So it seems the server does not like the OpenVox A1200 card OR perhaps the BIOS REV is incompatible with this Linux distro ? I wouldn't think so , but being the complete ubber newb, i dont know.

Has anyone any suggestions ?

Regards

 

[Bart]

A quick search on google tells me the error is:
The system BIOS has reported a PCI parity error on a component that resides in PCI configuration space at bus ##, device ##, function ##.
The system BIOS has reported a PCI parity error on a component that resides in the specified PCI slot.

Resolution steps:

http://support2.jp.dell.com/docs/systems/pe2950/en/hom/html/trouble.htm#wp1055534
http://support2.jp.dell.com/docs/systems/pe2950/en/hom/html/install.htm#wp1075760

if the problem persists, the riser card or system board is faulty. See Getting Help.

If the above fails, I'd try the card in a different machine - Check BIOS to see if you can disable parity checking.


Bart

 

[darmock]

I trolled the net for a bit and came up with some people think problems like this occur because of driver related issues with linux and your PERC controller

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/55138


You could try turning off the scsi controller dumping in a pata card and hard drive and see if you can install them onto your system. If so then you have isolated the problem down to the PERC. Bet you it all works 8^) But I have been wrong before.

I picked up a pci pata controller at compusa and keep an 80 gb hard drive laying around just for this type of bug

Tom

 

[jroper]

Hi

I can answer the reddish prompt question - last night, I uploaded a first stab at fixing the small number of issues outstanding, and that version had a red prompt. (it's now green)

It was up for about 20 minutes, so you were just unlucky.

Additionally, Ward had some issues with compiling due to the fact that he is about 5 hours behind me in GMT.

So all in all, I would not trust your install, and I would run it again.

Joe

 

[John Doe]

Hi,

Thanks to all who replied.

Ok the reddish prompt thing is solved - i was a bit worried about that given it was mentioned several times it should be green if all is well.

I think the first thing i will do is read thru the suggestions posted by Bart, then as Joe advises , reload the whole system.

If it does turn out to be the PERC as darnock suggests , will that mean no card at all will work under this setup ? I thought it may just be this particular card that does not like this particular model of server.

I may load up PiaF on another old dell server and see what happens.

Will keep testing and report back

Thanks for the input.

Regards

John Doe

P.S Joe are you still active in MESH ?

 

[jroper]

Ah ha - you made the connection re. Mesh, from time to time, I still do some LW Wireless Mesh consultancy, although more time is taken up now with Asterisk.

Here is a link to a Mesh / Asterisk project writeup I did in the summer.

http://forum.asterisk2billing.org/viewtopic.php?t=2467

Joe

 

[John Doe]

Hi,

Joe , can you make *work on a MB ? The experimental versions you can add via wiana are not much good, afaik.

JD

 

[jroper]

Hi

The version used in LW is version 0.9 of asterisk, so purely experimental. Bear in mind that this was before GUI's for Asterisk, and it was all relatively new.

All the VoIP / Mesh installs I have done involved putting an * box at the gateway which gives good results with SIP, such as here:

http://www.iicd.org/articles/iicdnews.2005-09-09.1626802681/

Asterisk is now probably too big to fit on a 32Mb CF card, as it did when that version was crafted. SER is probably more useful on a Mesh AP, but even so, I have never had to use it.

Joe

 

[darmock]

Hi,

Thanks to all who replied.

Ok the reddish prompt thing is solved - i was a bit worried about that given it was mentioned several times it should be green if all is well.

I think the first thing i will do is read thru the suggestions posted by Bart, then as Joe advises , reload the whole system.

If it does turn out to be the PERC as darnock suggests , will that mean no card at all will work under this setup ? I thought it may just be this particular card that does not like this particular model of server.

I may load up PiaF on another old dell server and see what happens.

Will keep testing and report back

Thanks for the input.

Regards

John Doe

P.S Joe are you still active in MESH ?

There are numerous posts out there about linux drivers for this card. It seems to come down to you need to linux drivers for this card installed. This is a Centos 5 problem (if indeed it is related to the driver) and not really PIAF. I would contact Dell Support (shudder) and see what they have to say. I would mention to them it is a Centos 5 box you are trying to install it on as opposed to a PIAF box because I am sure they would have no idea what a PIAF box is 8^)

I have been down this route with several IBM servers and beating my head against the wall trying to get things to work.... Lately for fun I have been playing with asterisk on a Sun Sparc platform with scsi.... works after a fashion.


Tom

 

[John Doe]

Hi,

After extensive talks with OpenVox we have agreed it is an issue with the A1200 card and the server. It is probably centered around the PERC 5i controller but but not sure.

I tried loading up an application called EdgeBox which has Asterisk 1.2 on board and i have exactly the same issue. I am not sure which Linux EdgeBox use but as fas as i know they roll their own distro. The fact i get exactly the same problem on two different distros, with two different versions of Asterisk (1.4 in PiaF and 1.2 on EB) would seem to ( on the surface anyway) indicate this is not a problem with Asterisk per se and the A1200 card. The A1200 card just does not like the server.

After the initial posts the other night here, i had to do a reboot on the PiaF server because i had lost the eth connection to the server. When i restored the eth connection the server couldn't seem to see it again and so i had to reboot. During the reboot the server crashed again. This time i was right next to the server to see what was going on and i saw these messages echoed to the screen ;

CPU 2: Machine check exception : 0000000000000004
Uh huh NMI Received for unknown for unknown reason 31 on CPU 0
Do you have a strange power mode enabled?
Dazed and confused but trying to continue
CPU 0: Machine check exception : 0000000000000005
Bank 5: b200001084200e0f
Kernel Panic - not syncing : CPU context corrupt
Bank 0 :b200000410000800
Bank 5 :b200000044100e0f
Kernel Panic - not syncing : CPU context corrupt

I gave all this information to OpenVox and they feel it is a conflict with this card and the server.

I might also add OpenVox are really great to work with., They answer all emails very promptly and are keen to work with me to solve this for me. You dont get that sort of customer service very much anymore. They really seem to be working overtime on this one for me and i really appreciate that. Well done OpenVox ! Still it aint over till the fat lady sings and as it stands i have a few A1200 cards i cant use :-(

Darnoc, are you saying this issue could possibly be solved by having a driver for the Perc 5i rolled into the distro used by PiaF ?

Regards

JD

 

[darmock]

>Darnoc, are you saying this issue could possibly be solved by having a driver for the Perc 5i rolled into the distro used by PiaF ?<

Darmock

Never said rolled into the PIAF distro unless everyone is going to run a PERC controller. This might be something you could lobby Centos for as drivers for specific non telephony hardware is really their area of concern. If you manage to find a way to get PERC drivers installed into Centos and wish to share I will place the instructions on the script site; if sufficiently complex I will write an install script. You also might want to check out the latest Centos 5.1 that came out yesterday or so. There may be drivers for PERC in the new version from the Centos folks



Tom

aka Darmock

 

[John Doe]

Hi Darmock, (Tom)

Ok its clear now. I will do some research and see what i can find. I dont know about others but i want to use Dell Servers here for PBX's for my clients so finding the driver and getting it into the OS would be a worthwhile thing.

I have to go bush early tomorrow morning and wont be back for a week or so, so i will jump onto it then.

Thanks for your continued interest in this - its appreciated and i hope others can benefit from this discussion as well. I know it would have helped me when i was looking for a server platform to use.

Regards

JD

 

[darmock]

Hi JD

No problems a lot of people use DELL and it would be nice if all the majors actually settled on a consistent platform/hardware but that would be too easy....

Hardware problems have been the bane of a lot of problems with all flavors of Asterisk. It is why the majors PBX Co's are coming out with appliances (which you can only get form them) instead of regular PC. Of course why should someone come up with a "standard" platform that everyone could just use with no irq conflicts? Makes no sense why you would put all of the techies out of business. 8^)
geez you made me rant at hardware vendors early today.

For my own clients I simply use a reliable board and build my own. Lately I have been using supermicro server boards intel of course (Less problems than AMD at the moment with Centos)


This is not name brand bashing as the majors all make a good product it is more that M$ has this payola relationship with some of them and they tend not to care to have drivers for linix as of course who would want to run anything but M$ products...... ah rant mode off.

Let me know what you find.

Tom