Ever since I installed a high-availability kit - Intel Management Module, Professional Edition (IMM) and secondary hot-swap power supply and case fans - in my Gateway 9510 Server (aka Intel SC5300 with motherboard SE7520AF2), I've been seeing occasional (sometimes frequent) transient (and apparently-spurious) fan-redundancy alerts. There are typically five alerts (plus deasserted echoes of the first two) within ca. 10 seconds, and the cycle repeats more or less randomly, with a periodicity of minutes to hours. The most-recent set from Gateway Systems Manager Reports | Hardware Events is ...
Date
Generator
Sensor type
Details
09/03/2007 07:51:45 PM
IPMB Slave Address
Fan
Fan Sys Fan 4: Lower Non-critical - going low
09/03/2007 07:51:45 PM
IPMB Slave Address
Fan
Fan Sys Fan 4: Lower Critical - going low
09/03/2007 07:51:47 PM
IPMB Slave Address
Fan
Fan Fan Redundancy: Redundancy Lost
09/03/2007 07:51:47 PM
IPMB Slave Address
Fan
Fan Fan Redundancy: Non-redundant - unit is functioning with minimum resources needed for normal operation
09/03/2007 07:51:56 PM
IPMB Slave Address
Fan
Fan Fan Redundancy: Fully Redundant
The machine has two 3.6 GHz Xeon CPUs with 4 Gb RAM and several SCSI HDs (boot, temp, I/O and data RAID 10 on a MegaRAID card). Although both Xeons are Intel SKU BX80546KG3600, one is sSpec SL7ZJ (stepping N0) and the other is sSpec SL8P3 (stepping R0). The OS is Windows SBS 2003 SP2. I've run (and rerun) the Gateway 9510/E-9510T Server Platform Firmware Update CD Version 2.4, and have installed: (1) IMM firmware version 0.51; (2) HSC 6-Drive SCSI hot swap backplane version 1.13; (3) BIOS version P06.00.0108; and (4) FRU/SDR version 6.7.4.
I suspect that this issue (plus a CPU stepping-difference warning that I'm ignoring) may have been resolved in BIOS version P.10.00.0109 (February 8th, 2006). Unfortunately, Gateway has not certified any BIOS updates after P06.00.0108 (having discontinued the machine), and installing such would void my warranty.
The machine is still under warranty, and Gateway tech support has suggested replacing the motherboard. Maybe I'm cynical, and that seems like a typical tech-support SWAG. They've also told me that this issue won't harm the machine.
What would be the best course? Thank you.
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