Last Friday, my OpenBSD firewall, which runs on a SYS-5018A-FTN4, mysteriously crashed. I chalked it up to an alpha particle or something and rebooted. About 12 hours later, it failed again. This time I did some more digging. On the console was the following message:

  NMI ... going to debugger
  Stopped at    acpicpu_idle+0x22d:     nop
  ddb{0}>

I googled it and found one similar report on the OpenBSD misc mailing list from September 2016 [1]. Interestingly, the person who reported the bug was running the same Supermicro board as I was. The report didn't get anywhere other than a vague suggestion that it might be heat related. These boxes run very cool and I didn't think that was likely. I thought it might be a RAM issue and that it was probably just a coincidence that the other person had the same hardware as I, but now I'm inclined to think that both of us have experienced the issue described in TFA.

Seems like I'll be looking for new firewall hardware.

[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg149348.html

If you were able to reboot the box then you did not hit this issue. When you hit this issue your chip is dead.

This may be completely unrelated though.