When things go wrong…
By john on Jan 25, 2009 in Apple, featured
So I’ve written here before about my home network. It’s more advanced than most because I enjoy playing with technology and making it work for me. Some people watch TV or play video games constantly, I play with servers and networks. Just like sometimes an XBox 360 will give the red-ring of death, my servers aren’t always healthy. Or working at all.
And so it was, last night, when I noticed my connection to the Internet did not appear to be working (quite suddenly, as it had been working moments before). I decided to go check out my router – an older model XServe I built into a gateway. I found it hung on boot with a strange message (that I PROBABLY should have written down but didn’t – it was 12:30am) so I hard cycled it. And it promptly Kernel Panic’d. Subsequent reboots all were met with the same panic: Panic(CPU 0) Unable to find driver for this platform: rackmac 1,3
I have tried a few potential solutions, such as booting while holding Command-Option-O-F, waiting until it gives me a prompt and typing reset-nvram, pressing enter then typing reset-all followed by enter, which resets the NVRAM then forces a reboot. The reboot came up the first time with a flashing folder/question mark. At that point I figured “ok, it now just can’t find the system volume – I can probably repair the disk and be good to go, at least that’s worth a shot. So I tried booting from the 10.5 DVD by pressing and holding C while booting, and was met promptly with the kernel panic (before I could even select the boot media). Subsequent attempts at using the reset-nvram trick have not met with the same success as the first attempt. In fact – everything tried since that has met with the same kernel panic.
What I have NOT tried, mainly because I’m still not entirely sure of the correct procedure, is resetting the PMU. I spoke with a buddy of mine regarding this last night, shortly after it happened, and it was suggested that resetting the PRAM might work, and if that didn’t then resetting the PMU might but is a bit more work (since I believe it requires actually pressing a small button on the logic board).
You may be wondering: If the xserve you were using as your gateway/router is dead, and you WEREN’T able to get it working again, how are you writing this?! The answer to that is that I have been using an Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) for my wireless. A quick re-configuration of the AEBS, and my 2-Wire POS DSL gateway, as well as a re-routing of some ethernet cables in my server rack, and everything was back online. It’s not the IDEAL solution, but I’ve got everything working fine in the interim.
I did lose internal DNS functionality, but I’ve been considering bringing up an internal DNS server on my second XServe that I can use in the interim.
If anybody has any suggestions on possible causes for this kernel panic – or better yet, solutions, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to be able to recover the system if I can.
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