[K12OSN] Freezing!?!

[Sudev Barar]

On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 11:02, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
> "Secure Mode: Can prevent unauthorized access and possible damage to the 
> system using software protection. Secure Mode allows the Network 
> Administrator to lock both the power and reset button, thus preventing 
> unauthorized access to the use of the servers." 
> 
> Intel server boards have 2 passwords. One for Admin and one for user. If you 
> set the user password you also get a timer option for "Secure mode". I 
> believe this is ONLY supported under windows as it locks the keyboard and 
> mouse and takes control away from the OS. Linux kernels don't like this and 
> will panic. That explains why my display and processess were still perfectly 
> active when the system went down. Also, another piece of evidence would be 
> that it would usually happen after 1 min of no keyboard of mouse activity 
> (default timer value). Also, my power button could not turn off the system 
> (very weird if you have never experienced it) Intel should not make their 
> BIOS firmware OS specific. With Micro$oft buying a large stake of Pheonix I 
> think this situation is going to get worse.
> 
> Robert Arkiletian

Robin,
On checkin I find:
1. I am using 865 Intel MoBo - Desktop board co-opted for LTSP server
2. Neither Super or User pass word is set.
3. Freezing as you described happened with no co-relation to
applications / load / time of day / how long the server was up.

My own take was that I saw something to effect that DosEmu had problems
in running SMP mode and since we were testing a DosEmu application we
switched to non-SMP mode. Both DosEmu and this problem disappeared!
When we went back to SMP kernel problem appeared. Since I did not find
much difference in performance in either mode I reverted back to non-SMP
kernel and have not had repeat of problem. As additional measure we had
also disabled hyper threading mode in BIOS. Have not experimented
further.
Right now initial googling did not yield results. Will dig in more.
-- 
Sudev Barar
Learning Linux