Cyborg Computing

I have had a Dell PowerEdge 850 running Linux for a year now and have not done much with it.

I always noticed that when I was on it, there seemed to be a load on the CPU, and I always assumed it was because there was very little memory. Adding memory has been on the agenda ever since I bought the machine, but I was waiting to I really started using it.

So, like any good tech, I went out and bought 4 Gigs of memory and installed it. Turns out I already had 1 Gig in the machine, so now I am up to 5 Gigs. BIOS says 5 Gigs, so it must be true. I restart the machine and go to my site, and it seems faster… YAY!!!

Only to find over the next day that it slows to a crawl again. I looked at ‘free -m’ and ‘top’ and see that I only have 256M of memory. WHAT?!?!!? I just installed 4 extra Gigs. I tried everything, doing research on the Internet, upgrading almost everything in Linux. Remote rebooting (which I dread everytime I do it). Nothing worked.

So then I decided to go back to Atlantic.net where my server is colocated and try and find out what happened. I changed a couple of things in BIOS, rebooted and what do you know, 5G is reported in Linux.

I wasn’t positive what fixed it, because I changed multiple variables at once…

Then talking to a good friend of mine, Daniel DellaPosta, he tells me that there is a setting in Dell’s BIOS “OS Install Mode”. If that is turned on, then you only get 256M of memory to use. The sad part is I tried getting ahold of him first, but he wasn’t available (such a busy busy man). Oh well, patience on my part would have saved me hours.

Terms that I searched for were:
Linux only see 256M
Linux can’t see all of my memory