HP servers going to sleep sporadically.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mal Osborne
  • Start date Start date
M

Mal Osborne

Having an ongoing problem with 3 HP TC-3100 servers thinking they are
laptops, and going into some sort of "hibernation" mode. When this happens,
the server is unresponsive to the keyboard or mouse, and the NIC cannot be
pinged. The power light flashed in about a one second 50/50 duty cycle.
Sometimes it can be "woken" by a quick prod of the power button. At other
time, this causes the server to start it's fans, begin awakening, and go
back to sleep in about 10 seconds. In this case, holding the power switch
down and forcing a power off is needed.



The event logs show nothing helpful, if the server woke up without a forced
power off, there is nothing at all. With a forced power off, the event log
looks like it would were the power cable pulled.



All three servers have no out of band management, and everything is genuine
HP. In one case, we had HP change a mainboard, this seemed to solve the
problem. In another case, swapping the mainboard made no difference. (As
the problem is sporadic, I am unsure if the mainboard was ever the issue)



One server is currently doing this several times per day, but there seems to
be no pattern. Sometimes it happens a few mins after a reboot, other times
after a few weeks, sometimes it seems to come & go. One machine is a
Terminal Server, sometimes it shuts down while in use.



All 3 servers are running Windows2000 (SBS in one case), Trend CSM 3.0, and
APC Powerchute. Everything is up to date. Older versions of the BIOS & APC
powerchute exhibited the same behaviour.



Any ideas?



Mal Osborne

MCSE MVP Mensa
 
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