20:15 Wednesday, April 04 2007

so very tired

of crappy hardware. The fiasco continues. I had 3 systems. Two were identical in terms of hardware. The 3rd was somewhat different. The 3rd, initially just wouldn't boot any SUSE distro. Fine, i worked around it. Today I discovered that the 3rd also won't install RHEL5-x86_64 (x86 works fine). Back to the two identical systems. They were randomly locking up, usually during a lengthy p4 sync, with no information whatsoever in any logs. I determined that they had a really old BIOS, so updated to the latest which made things *worse*. Now in addition to the random lockups, they hang at the end of installing any RH based distro (just when it should reboot). Also, attempts to get into the BIOS at POST results in a black screen and a hang of the system. So we're working on getting these two identically crappy systems replaced. I've got a replacement for one of them, which is a system with an Intel motherboard. So far, it seems to be alot better, except when attempting to boot RHEL-3.6-x86_64. That bails out claiming that I'm not using a 64bit CPU. Say what? Shouldn't that have been caught at install time? Of course even if it were, it still makes no sense, as every other 64bit distro works just fine. So the crap just keeps piling up.