[rescue] E250 temperatures

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:58:05 -0600, Robert Darlington wrote:
> I'd have to start asking why a system built in the last decade would
> take any more than a few minutes to POST.  What could the system
> possibly be doing that takes that kind of time?  I was extremely
> annoyed at the 5 minutes my old dell server would take.  None of my
> big iron systems (alpha, or sgi) ever took more than a few minutes to
> come up.

a) An E10k isn't that modern. 

b) The key is 'diags turned on'. Your Dell doesn't have that level of
   diagnostics on board. POST times are slightly more reasonable with
   diags turned off.

c) These systems are a bit bigger than your Dell. A later example
   (M8000) can take 32 cores, and 512Gbytes of memory. A PC memory
   'test' would probably take more than 5 minutes to count that memory.

d) There's a difference between the time taken to do a proper power on
   test. I don't have figures to hand, but I'd guestimate that some of
   the E6900 domains I admin (16 cores, 32Gbytes memory) would take
   5 minutes to test during a reboot, and something like 30minutes
   during power on.

e) These systems aren't supposed to be powered off.

f) If these systems have a slightly wonky CPU board or some memory with
   a bit of a problem, you *really* want to know about it early. Sure
   most can 'degrade' a CPU board during operation but it's better to
   degrade it early.

I'm pretty sure the bigger SGI stuff takes a while to get going too ...
at least the O2K I once worked on did.