[KLUG Members] Not the sharpest tack in the box.

[Adam Williams]

>>What model of Netfinity is this?
>4500R, sometimes referred to as an x230

One of my favorite models,  maxs out at 4GB SDRAM ECC (RDIMM).  It
should work fine.

>>It wouldn't hurt to try "mem=" at boot, but I'd torture the machine
>>afterwords for awhile to make sure it doesn't blow up, as mem= can seem
>>to work, but then....  
>A couple of google searches gave me that thought but I was thinking about trying
>that this weekend.
>>Part of the test NEEDs to be generating LOTs of
>>packets on the network interface as buffering in the stack needs to be
>>done on physical pages and so will turn up memory problems whereas
>>simple consumption of virtual/mapped pages by processes may not.  Run
>>several ping floods with large payloads from a couple of other machines
>>and something like smbtorture (if you have samba on the box) at the same
>>time while watching dmesg for complaints from the vm.  Pulling a couple
>>remote xterms off the box to a remote display and running "ls -lR /" and
>>"dd if={swap part} of=/dev/null bs=512" is a nice touch too.
>In other words beat it really hard.

Yep.

>>Have you flashed to the most current firmware?
>Nope.  But the bios recognizes the ram just fine.

True, but it may be locking certain regions out.  But I doubt it is a
BIOS thing.  

Flashing your IPS up to currents revs might be worth the trouble if it
isn't current.  More speed.

>>Your not mixing registered and unregistered DIMMS, right?
>All dimms were purchased from CDW as certified for this purchase.

Ok.

>>What kernel are you using?
>[root@srvbai1 modules]# uname -a
>Linux srvbai1 2.2.19-7.0.1smp #1 SMP Tue Apr 10 01:14:05 EDT 2001 i686 unknown
>notice the smp (-;
>>Past 1Gb I'd recommend using the "enterprise" RPMs,  they are adjusted
>>to deal better with oodles o'RAM.
>Unfortunately there is no smp enterprise rpm on the RH7.0 disk.

Bummer.  Can you grab the src rpm, install that, tweak the options and
then rebuild?  You may need "large memory support"