Dell PowerEdge 2900s lockup

Dear All,

We are running two Dell PowerEdge 2900s as Asterisk Servers.
They both have two Sagnoma A104d PCI Express cards inside.

Every few days they lockup with Machine Check Exceptions.

The LCD displays on the servers show the error message:
PCIE Fatal Error b0 d4 f0
According to the DELL manual page for the 2900:
it.precisemachining.com/docs/Del … /about.htm
this is a PCI parity error.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Neil Bilton.

[quote=“neilbilton”]
They both have two Sagnoma A104d PCI Express cards inside[/quote]

NOT a good idea to have two of any voice cards in one system - even worse is two 4 port T1 cards.

At a minimum make sure that each card is on its own interrupt and not sharing with any other hardware. At best either double the number of servers you have or get the 8 port card from sangoma. (Personally my vote would be double the servers for redundancy)

Thanks for your feedback swaterhouse,

I tried ensuring that both cards are on their own interrupt, but it still crashed.

It seems that I can stop the servers from crashing by either disabling MCEs, or by disabling parity checking.

I really don’t want to disable Machine Check Exceptions, because that could result in a very serious hardware error.

I’m also not too keen on disabling parity checking, although this seems like the lesser of 2 evils at the moment.

Has anyone had any experience with swtching either of these settings off on an Asterisk server?

Can you remove one of the cards to see if the crashes still happen with only one card installed?

Have you contacted Sangoma support? They may know of a hardware conflict.