I came across one unique parameter which I would like to share on our gurkulindia, specially for small business organisations where we dont have seperate power backups for DC.

Has anyone noticed while working on Solaris boxes if you will power down (init 5 or poweroff from LOM/ALOM/ILOM) the Solaris boxes, they wont come up automatically after physical power on (only LOM boots but No OS). Which is a serious concern if any power outage occur or any power unit failure occurs etc etc…

Ex: Suppose a power outage occurred in any DC and 100 Solaris boxes went down. Now after power restoration, you wont be able to see any Solaris Box up and running. Manual intervention is required and SA need to power on the boxes manually from LOM prompt. Practically this situation is highly unacceptable in any organisation and this is the default feature of Solaris.

After a long investigation and googling and PDF’s I safely landed on earth and the landmark is below. There is a parameter on LOM/ALOM (for Sparc arch.) and ILOM (for intel arch.) which you wont find in help. The default value for that parameter is FALSE which wont allow your OS instance to boot up and hence it just stuck and wait for manual intervention at LOM level only.

I have tested the same in large scaled Solaris environment while performing hardware replacements & upgrades, when the value is FALSE the server stuck at LOM and OS wont come up, on the other hand if the value is changed to TRUE and power restored the Box comes up. Full Story

System Controller battery (BATTERY at SC/BAT/V_BAT has exceeded low warning) failure in T-series servers.

Many a times you will get a hardware error in /var/adm/messages (or at ALOM/LOM prompt, console messages) for SC battery failure, In this post I will explain the battery replacement procedure along with its importance in the system.

sc> showfaults -v
Last POST run: THU AUG 09 11:08:20 2012
POST status: Passed all devices

  ID Time              FRU               Fault
   0 AUG 09 11:05:54   SC/BAT            BATTERY at SC/BAT/V_BAT has exceeded low warning threshold.

Importance:

Battery in T-series model is located on System Controller (SC) and system downtime is required to replace the battery.

The system controller contains the persistent storage for the host ID and Ethernet MAC addresses of the system, as well as the ALOM CMT configuration including the IP addresses and ALOM CMT user accounts, if configured.

Battery provides power to the System Controller NVRAM when no AC power  is applied to the system.

Note:

After SC battery replacement the date/time on the SC/host will set to default value as shown below, the same will reflect in the hosts UPTIME too if you wont set the date/time correctly after battery replacement:

sc> showdate
SAT JAN 01 00:06:55 UTC 2000 Full Story

The X4000 Family implements the ILOM – Integrated Lights Out Manager.  This is a combination of dedicated hardware and supporting software.

The Sun Fire X64 family of servers implement a technology called ILOM – Integrated Lights Out Manager where available. This is a combination of dedicated hardware and supporting software built on a service processor, integral to the platform.

Introduction

ILOM uses a hierarchical namespace.
It contains a predefined tree /SP namespace manages the ILOM. e.g. to manage users and clock settings. The SP namespace is generic over all platforms using the ILOM. /SYS namespace manages the host system. e.g. change the host state, read sensor information, and access other information for managed system hardware. The SYS namespace is unique to each platform. Full Story

Access Server’s OS Console from the LOM service Processor:

Server Models : SunFire V100/V120/V1280/E2900 and Netra 1280/1290

You can use below command to navigate between Server OS console and LOM port:

connecting to console from LOM prompt:

sc/lom>console

Returning to LOM from the Server console

presss #. ( # followed by a dot)

How to send break signal to console so that we can launch the server at OK> Prompt:

sc/lom>break – server will be landed into ok prompt

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This post is to highlight some of the steps needed to diagnose if an issue is in fact a disk performance issue or not.  And if it is, what data will be collected to help diagnose the issue. Please note that performance in general is not an easy issue to tackle.  This is because it can be caused by many issues that may not be disk related. Full Story

The hardware set up is very basic. A standard network cable with RJ45 connectors needs to be plugged into the port on the I/O panel labeled “NET MGT” with the other end connected to the network.

Note: This interface is 10HDX so please ensure that the network hardware can negotiate to that speed or be forced to 10hdx. Some older hubs/switches are 100MB only, and are unable to establish link with the ALOM ethernet port.
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