Thursday 20 January 2011

Intel Remote Management Module – Black Screen Or No Screen Refresh

One one of our Intel Server Systems deployments we had a really strange behaviour start to show itself after the box was delivered and set up at the client site.

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Many parts of the screen were blacked out like the above. When trying to log onto the console via the RMM3’s Web management portal from our office the SBS 2008 logon page would be almost completely black.

Hitting the video refresh would sometimes work to bring things up, but the only time we could really get anywhere with the RMM3 connection was just after a reboot.

While searching for some information on the new memory available for Intel Xeon 3400 series platforms we came across a mention of the black screens for certain Linux distros.

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Once we knew what to look for we could see that there were other results showing that there is indeed an issue and that some platforms may have received a fix while others have not.

The cause of the problem turns out to be the colour depth the physical console was set to _before_ dropping the box into the enclosure and locking it up headless.

After an update on this particular box we were able to log on using the RMM3 and bring up the Display Settings window. Sure enough, our colour depth was 24bpp:

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We managed to change the bit depth to 16bit:

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And, with that we now have a full SBS 2008 desktop running on an Intel Server System SR1630HGPRX!

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Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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