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225860
August 24th, 2012 05:00
Dell PowerEdge 2650 OS Install Problems
Hey,
I am new to this forum, as well as servers, although I have a reasonable amount of knowledge with building computers. Recently I bought 2 x Dell PowerEdge 2650 and an Intel Server off Ebay. I found that the Intel and one of the Dell's were fried (I'm guessing it's a motherboard issue). The last Dell is working completely fine and I have configured a RAID 1 array and 2 regular volumes (I also don't know what this SCSI thing is). I tried plugging in an old Windows 7 Professional (64 bit) CD into the machine, when the installer finally came up, which took forever it gave me an error, saying the CPUs didn't support 64 bit.
I then found an old Ubuntu CD (not knowing whether is was 32 or 64 bit) and plugged it in. It also gave an error, although it was a generic error, and didn't specify anything about 32 or 64 bit problems. I still assumed it was because it was 64 bit. So I burned a new CD with 32 bit Ubuntu on it and plugged it into the machine. After a while it came up with the Ubuntu background and a toolbar on top, displaying only a WiFi, Keyboard, and Volume icons in the top right of the screen, although no installer showed up. I left it for a few hours, and found that nothing had changed, and the exact same thing was displaying onscreen.
I really have no idea what to do. The guy I bought them from said that he didn't think that the Intel and one of the Dell's were working but this Dell was pretty new and hadn't been used that much. Obviously he had wiped the drives, so no OS.
Any responses are welcome, and if anyone has any advise for running servers, or anything then please leave a quick response.
Thanks in advance,
-Oliver Crow
DELL-Jonathan S
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August 27th, 2012 11:00
Thanks for sharing the log entries Oliver. Since single-bit error logging may still be disabled and the machine freezes when you open Firefox, one possibility is that one or more DIMMs are failing. What I would recommend is to clear the memory error log to re-enable single bit error logging by running "dcicfg command=clearmemfailures" from the terminal in OMSA live, and then try running the memory diagnostics which can be done during boot of the OpenManage Live CD by selecting diagnostics from GRUB instead of booting up normally. If the OMSA Live CD version is too old and does not have the diagnostics on it you can get this from ftp.us.dell.com/.../DELL_32-BIT-DIAGNOSTICS_5109-2_R197222.exe which you can run from Windows to extract an ISO and burn and boot that server to. If you do get memory errors which is a reasonable possibility on a very old machine like this you can narrow it down to the specific DIMM by swapping the DIMMs in pairs -- see support.dell.com/.../5g375c60.htm for valid configurations. Does that seem to help?
a3fdeas3r3
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August 27th, 2012 17:00
I've actually managed to install Ubuntu 11.04, and it doesn't like any versions above that. However the OS seems very slow, is it meant to run like that on a server like this? I mean it has 2 x Xeons and 10 GB of RAM...
theflash1932
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16.3K Posts
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August 27th, 2012 20:00
Did you install the Desktop version or the Server version? Graphics will suffer, as the 2650 has only like 8MB of video memory.
a3fdeas3r3
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August 28th, 2012 07:00
Oh, I am running Desktop as I don't have that much experience with Linux, so I decided to go with that. Should I install the Server version instead? And can everything be controlled from the server version?
DELL-Jonathan S
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August 28th, 2012 08:00
Unless you are doing something specifically graphical in nature, odds are almost certain you will have full control via a command line interface either in a text console or from a remote shell such as via ssh. I don't want to say "everyone" using Linux only accesses it via command line, but the command shell is one of the system's strengths, and Linux and its tools are very well-suited to command-line usage. The machine itself is indeed old and slow but chances are the slowness you're experiencing is the GUI being sluggish and seeming less responsive due to the lack of graphics support characteristic of server models. The server and desktop versions of Ubuntu differ by the package sets and configuration but if you do want to do the server version since you're just starting out it may be easier just to reinstall from the server version. Alternatively you could make runlevel 3 the default runlevel by following the instructions at help.ubuntu.com/.../UpstartHowto and then reboot and just install whatever server packages you wanted (i.e. packages for web server, file server, name server, mail server, etc). On the other hand, since you're just starting out with Linux, if you don't feel at-home on the command line just yet you may want to grin and bear the GUI slowness for the time being so you can have Firefox open to look stuff up to type in the terminal window -- that probably facilitates a smoother transition for you into the unfamiliar environment. Once you've become more comfortable you can turn the GUI off by changing runlevels or just reinstall the server edition.
theflash1932
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August 28th, 2012 08:00
I agree with Jon here, which is why I asked ... the Server version will likely run its services great - and a GUI can be installed on the otherwise GUI-less Server version - but I would suspect the slowdown will be because of this. Linux servers are often managed remotely from a command line. I am NOT this type of linux user :)