Network does not see tower

[mickeykelley]

Last night we had to shut down the tower due to thunderstorms.  It was a normal going to the tower main from Firefox on one of the pc's and doing the normal take off line, and power down.  This morning, everything was turned on and appears to come up, but not seen on the network.  All other pc's see each other, internet, etc.  Sometimes in the past this has happened and we just login to the root, and reboot and magically it is visible.  However, this time we have rebooted several times, including the router, server and all machines but still nothing,  The tower appears to boot normally and comes up to the login prompt, and will allow me to login in.  What should I try next?

[RobJ]

Syslog?  Save it to flash and carry to another station.

[mickeykelley]

File attached.

syslog.txt

[mickeykelley]

Any ideas?

[RobJ]

* That's a venerable old motherboard (the ASUS P5-VM DO), once the king of boards here in unRAID-land.  Just yesterday while updating the Hardware Compatibility wiki, I downgraded the recommendation for it and others, was still recommended!  Unfortunately, it's aging.  Almost the first thing logged is that it can't support "fast string operations" (could be the CPU's fault though).  Farther down, an important timer is no longer working well, too slow by 9ms in 100ms, a huge 9% error!  (It's detected and adjusted for.)  I don't remember timer issues in the past, so I suspect it's a sign of aging.  (This is a little off-topic though, nothing to do with your main issues.)

 

* You still have the system configured (in the BIOS settings) with the original default for SATA mode, as IDE-emulated not AHCI.  AHCI mode would have been a bit faster and safer, and what happened here is a classic case of that.  A single drive, happens to be your Parity drive, is holding the rest of the system hostage.  It's using older and poorer exception handling, and its issues are in that borderline case where the kernel sees the drive and it responds partly but not fully, so it never gives up on the drive.  It just keeps sending resets to the drive, then waiting and trying again, then repeating.  And all of this repeating cycle is stopping the rest of the system in initializing correctly.  The unRAID modules are only given so much time, usually more than enough, to setup, but this time, drive setup hadn't finished before unRAID tried to start.

 

* The network chipset was initialized earlier, but networking was never setup, and eth0 did not find a carrier.  I don't know whether that's because the higher level network setup was not performed, or there really was no networking line available.  You might check the lights on the connector and switch/router.

 

* First thing I would do is change the BIOS settings, set SATA mode for all SATA subsystems to AHCI or if not there, then a native SATA mode, anything but IDE emulation.  IDE emulation ties drives into pairs, so if one is having problems, then it's likely its paired drive is also affected.  Not good!

 

* A worst case, there's a chance you were hit by a lightning spike, damaging your equipment (even if they were off).  I had one once that traveled network connections, destroying switches and network chipsets, but not the systems themselves.  I had to install new switches and NIC's almost everywhere.

 

* Since it's your Parity drive, you can unassign it and test or Preclear it, and put it back online.  Obviously, this all depends on getting networking up again.  You may have to add a network card (and disable the onboard one).  (I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting something else.)

[mickeykelley]

I feel so stupid.  First, I did unplug both the power cord and the network cable, because several years ago, the built in NIC got zapped since I didn't unplug it during a storm.  I had to add a card.  Now the dummy part was when I plugged it back in, out of habit I plugged it into the dead one.  Woke up in middle of the night thinking about it.  Plugged it into the right one and presto, its up.  Thanks for taking the time to respond.