What's Chris been doing?

Less than 24 hours after I enabled it on six Dell 745s, three of them have given up the ghost. Not permanently I suppose (I haven’t physically checked them yet) but they’ve certainly failed to wake up: all three went to sleep just after 1pm yesterday and have failed to communicate with the profile server since then. The other three machines seem fine – they woke up yesterday evening and downloaded new profiles, then last night, then most recently this morning between 8am and 9am.

Also, my own test 745, which went through an accelerated test of hundreds of sleep cycles thanks to my rather cruelly giving it a maximum sleep period of three minutes, yesterday hung rather than wake up. After I’d manually rebooted it and it had slept perfectly happily a number of times more, it then repeated the trick last night shortly after 8pm.

So, to do:

• boot the benighted machines single-user and save copies of whatever they managed to log before freezing
• remove lcfg-sleep from the lab machines (edit: I’m leaving it to run for longer. Nobody uses those machines anyway.)
• rethink the supported models (currently Dell 745, 755 and new HP 7900).

On the last point I’m now wondering whether Dells are just too crappy and unreliable to be trusted with power management at all? The HP has behaved flawlessly – but then, it hasn’t gone through as many sleep cycles as my own test Dell 745, so who knows how it’ll work out. IS seem to manage, but not with Linux, they have to boot the machines into Windows to sleep them – and Windows has traditionally had its hardware support designed specifically around the shortcomings and unreliability of whatever’s provided by the hardware vendors.

I think I’m going to have to arrange a mass HP 7900 sleep test somehow.
There’s still the possibility of getting 755s to behave reliably, and I’ll work on that, but it seems unlikely to succeed.