Very odd boot delay... BMC problem?

[Bogart Salzberg]

Hello all,

One of my sc1435 servers stalled for 7 minutes on restart last night  
and I'm trying to determine the cause.

I have two of these sc1435 servers, both from 2007, both running  
Debian Lenny with the same 2.6.26 Linux kernel. I restarted both of  
them yesterday (remotely) after a kernel upgrade. One of them came  
back online in 2 minutes, as usual. The other took almost ten minutes  
to contact. The output of dmesg (snipped) shows a striking difference:

(the quick one...)

[   11.783779] IPMI kcs interface initialized
[   11.791775] ipmi device interface
[   13.348888] kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
[   13.360219] EXT3 FS on dm-0, internal journal
[   13.360350] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

(the slow one...)

[   13.785346] IPMI kcs interface initialized
[   13.821385] ipmi device interface
[  434.277541] kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
[  434.291516] EXT3 FS on dm-0, internal journal
[  434.291645] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

I am trying to figure out what happened in the intervening 7 minutes  
between "ipmi device interface" and "kjournald starting". Perhaps an  
issue with the BMC? A timeout?

 From syslog...

Apr  8 21:06:35 horace syslog-ng[2447]: syslog-ng shutting down;  
version='2.0.9'
Apr  8 21:14:19 horace syslog-ng[4605]: syslog-ng starting up;  
version='2.0.9'

Upon logging in I ran "uptime" and found that the server had been "up"  
for 5 of the 7 minutes of darkness and silence. It's not clear from  
the uptime man page when/how the timer starts.

bogart at horace:~$ uptime
  21:19:00 up 10 min,  1 user,  load average: 1.12, 1.37, 0.73

Any ideas? Has anyone else experienced an issue like this?

Thanks for your help.

Bogart Salzberg