I purchased some servers from Qsol. I've discovered that these servers won't boot up without a keyboard plugged in. The server starts booting up, gets to the GRUB boot loader, then hangs a little bit after that. It stops at "mxt_scan_bios"; the next line after that is (which I see when I do have a keyboard plugged in) is "Starting kswapd v1.8".

I've tried fooling with the settings in the BIOS with no luck. I don't know if this is a Linux issue or a BIOS issue (although I do have some Dell servers with the same installation of Linux that boot fine without a keyboard). The Qsol servers have Intel 815 chipsets, although here again I don't know if that makes a difference. I did some web searching but came up empty.

Anyone have any ideas?

I think it is the BIOS too.



:cool:

Anyone have any ideas?
Get a keyboard :)

That doesn't make any sense to me. If something is going to complain about the lack of a keyboard, it should be the BIOS, not Linux. (Of course, I throw out motherboards that won't let me disable the keyboard check.)

Are you running a PS/2 or USB keyboard? If USB, do you have legacy keyboard emulation turned on in the BIOS?

We had the same problem with a server that would not boot w/o the KB. It turned out that it was in the BIOS and we applies a "hack" to it. I am not sure what the BIOS version/model was, but you Qsol should be able to help. They are pretty good from what I hear.

It doesn't sound like a BIOS keyboard error. Normally you wouldn't get that far if BIOS required a keyboard. But, just to be safe, I'd make sure the settings are good. The BIOS setting is often something like: "Halt on ...." It should be set to either nothing or all but keyboard.

If it was a bios error it woulwd def come up before the OS loads or the kernal i should say. Sounds like a linux problem, what version of linux do you have?

Hi, thanks for all the replies.

I'm running RedHat 7.2. I also feel it's probably not a BIOS issue because I'm getting past the boot loader, although I've got the same operating systems with the same configuration loaded on to Dell servers and I don't have the problem with them. I took a really good look at the BIOS settings and I don't see anything relavant.

I'm using plain-ol' PS/2 keyboards, not USB.

I did contact Qsol right away, and they've not been able to shed any light on what the problem may be. So far I've got two of the servers I ordered from them up and running and they both have the problem.

I discovered I can plug a mouse in to the keyboard port and they system will boot up. This causes kudzu to run durring boot which means 30 longer boot times, but if I can't fix the problem I guess it's better to have a bunch of mice hanging around the rack than a bunch of keyboards.

I doubt this is of much help, but I doubt that the mxt module or kswapd has anything to do witht the keyboard. It's probably something after that in the process. Probably right about there is the keyboard initialization process? You'd think that it would just time out and continue.

Anyway, can't you check the message log from a failed boot (after you reboot it with the keyboard)?

then plug the mouse and tape the back of the mouse behind the server and put it back into the rack?