This is a continuing report on my out of box experience with a new Dell R640 server. The series starts here.
The replacement motherboard came in to the FedEx office in Soquel yesterday. The tech offered to come down that day, but I had a conflict, so he came this morning. He installed the new motherboard in about 20 minutes, and while he was at it, I took the opportunity to see how a 1U server is configured. It was darned impressive. An almost complete absence of wires — everything pretty much just clipped together. The motherboard was huge, as you’d expect, considering that there wasn’t much space above it available of anything. The RAID controller, with an impressive heatsink on top, clipped into it. There was a set of low risers for daughter cards, Cooling was provided by a whole array of low-profile muffin fans arranged across the front part of the motherboard behind the drive bays. There was no separate fan for the CPU, but the heatsink on it was clearly designed with those fans in mind. There were even fins between all the memory cards to control the air flow. Kudos to Dell for all that.
The tech took the machine back up to the staging area, made sure that it booted right now, configured some stuff, and turned it over to me. Nice guy. Good service. Good job, Unisys.
I let the machine run for a few hours and checked for smoke. None. That’s good.
Then I configured the iDRAC for a static IP address (it comes configured as a DHCP client) and installed a bunch of Windows updates. At the end of all that, the machine wanted to restart. I said OK, and went off to do something else. When I got back, it was powered down.
Uh-oh.
Is there something that’s keeping it from restarting properly?
I did a manual restart, and that went fine.
So far, so good, except for that mysterious power-down.
[Added Jan 14, 2019: I’ve decided to call it fixed.]
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