Detecting lights on Dell

[Terry Gliedt]

Davide Ferrari wrote:
> El Tuesday 11 December 2007 15:18:13 Terry Gliedt escribió:
>> We've recently moved a number of Dells PowerEdge servers (1425, 1850,
>> 1950, 2950) to a remote location. I'd like to run a cron job to detect
>> that an orange light is on, meaning 'come pay attention to me'. I have
>> one such machine for 'testing'.
> 
> I think that you're taking the wrong approach. I mean, external lights are 
> meant to inform people phisically there, and they respond to hardware status 
> changes. But there could be LOTS of meanings for a yellow led blinking. So, 
> the best way to operate is directly checking the hardware from remote with a 
> specific tool like Dell OpenManage, that can guarantee you a better fine 
> grained control over your hardware status.

I understand about the lights. I was hoping to use IPMI to simply find 
out that something needed attention (the equivalent of an orange light) 
so I'd know to run diagnostics. At the moment I have an SC1425 with a 
memory parity error and I was looking for some ipmitool subcommand which 
  returns something I could scan for when "something was wrong".

Over serveral attempts I've had extremely poor experience with 
OpenManage, but since this seems to be the favorite I tried it again 
with a Debian package someone on this list pointed to in August 
(dellomsa_5.2.0-2_i386.deb).

I caught a production server being unused and attempted to install the 
package. Yikes! It took me 4 reboots to recover (PE 6600 which takes 15 
minutes for each boot), losing over an hour for my users.

 From the messages on the console it appeared the init.d script (not 
sure which one) was trying to insert a module in the kernel. Whatever 
was going on caused the script to be stuck waiting for something and no 
amount of killing processes could bring it out. Result - hung machine 
during boot.

This has been typical of my efforts with OpenManage. If something does 
not work (always the case so far), the machine becomes unusable. Way too 
much function I do not want with way too many dependencies and 
apparently not enough checking if something does not work.  I know there 
are others who use it, but I've been bitten more than once and now am 
more than twice shy. :-(

Thanks for the responses though.