Posts Tagged ‘ALOM’
In day-to-day work for a remote administrator like me, most important of all is to make sure the server is accessible all the time for troubleshooting and other server administration task. In some unlucky situation when server doesn’t accept login, then ALOM is the lifeboat.
What is ALOM? Sun Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM) is the standard System Controller (SC) for remote out-of-band management for many current and future Sun servers. In non-geek word, we can manipulate ALOM to do task as if the server is in front of you while the fact it is distant away. So I can instruct the machine to reboot without disturbing Data Center guy in the middle of the night to do the job for me.
To do that, log in to the ALOM using terminal and reboot the server by issuing poweroff command first and poweron it back after few minutes.
To shutdown server, use
poweroff
To put it back online, use
poweron
It’s good to know that we can check status of the server using showenvironment to make sure the hardware condition is still sane.
Output of the said command in my (client’s) Sun Fire v490 is as per below;
rsc> showenvironment
=============== Environmental Status ===============
System Temperatures (Celsius):
——————————
P0 42
P1 45
P2 43
P3 43
DBP0 22=================================
Front Status Panel:
——————-Keyswitch position is in On mode.
System LED Status: LOCATOR FAULT POWER
[OFF] [OFF] [ ON]=================================
Disk LED Status: OK = GREEN ERROR = YELLOW
DISK 1: [OK]
DISK 0: [OK]=================================
Fan Tray :
———-Tray Speed Status
—- —– ——
FAN TRAY0 CPU FAN0 5769 [OK]
FAN TRAY0 CPU FAN1 4000 [OK]
FAN TRAY0 CPU FAN2 3896 [OK]
FAN TRAY1 IO FAN0 4000 [OK]
FAN TRAY1 IO FAN1 4225 [OK]=================================
Power Supplies:
—————Supply Status PS Fault Fan Fault Temp Fault
—— ———— ——– ——— ———-
0 OK OFF OFF OFF
1 OK OFF OFF OFF=================================
Super nice! Isn’t it?
In my first time using ALOM, after poweron the server, the server still doesn’t come “online” yet. I didn’t have a clue until I was shown by my higher technical guy that the server is actually ‘stuck’ at OK prompt. The reason is because autoboot is set to false. If you ever face the same thing like mine, after poweron, go to the console.
rsc> console
Here, issue printenv command of auto-boot.
ok printenv auto-boot?
auto-boot = false
ok setenv auto-boot? true
auto-boot = true
ok reset-all
In example above, I set the auto-boot from false to true. You can actually either use the solution above if you want permanently set auto-boot to true or, if you want the configuration stay put but still continuing the booting, issue command boot. Server will boot after that.
It’s a good practice also to store the OK variable for future reference. In a peaceful time, issue command eeprom in your terminal to show the output of OK variable.
Sun ALOM Software User’s Guide can be found here. Happy ALOM’ing !
/home/darkwan 