Well, I guess it was as simple as opening the unit’s case, flipping switch #6 to ON and rebooting. That cleaned out the CMOS and NVRAM and after that success. The machine now boots and runs SuSE 9 Enterprise. Did I say as simple as? Actually, quite a few things were tried (switching to Enterprise version, downloading updated drivers from HP.com, switching from grub to lilo, and so on. But the last thing I tried (blowing out the CMOS & NVRAM) seemed to make it reboot reliably.
I’m guessing either HP had some settings in there that worked for their default OS (Windows) but thwarted reliable Linux booting…or I changed something I shouldn’t have touched (also quite possible).
In any case, we now have our proxy server software (EZProxy) running on the new Proliant box. The old Ultra II is standing by (network cable unplugged), ready to leap back into action if we see a hiccup during the next day or so but I think it will run fine. Thankfully, since the new machine has the same name as the old, our SSL certificate works as expected. Hope I remember to update it next March.
There’s still a quirk somewhere that I’ll continue to investigate (seems it won’t boot up if we put the 2nd hard drive in the unit…or maybe it’s when the CD isn’t inserted…or maybe…well, there were just too many variables involved on the last reboot to be able to narrow it down).
With the way power comes & goes around here, we’ll have ample opportunity to test various theories during the coming weeks.
12 hours later…
Put the 2nd SCSI disk back in the server but in slot 4 (instead of slot 2). Showed up and I did a reiserfs on it…all’s well. I’m now able to say HP can make more than printers–but not yet willing to say I’d buy another one of these things. Of course, after spending so much time getting it to work, I probably should buy only these units–I now know so much about them.