We live in a world where hardware breaks, and when it does, most adminsitrators want to get notified that something failed, and the specific component that failed. The Sun galaxy server line contains built-in hardware monitoring, and allows hardware events to be sent to administrators through SNMP, email and SYSLOG. The hardware notification facility in the X2200 servers complements the alerting capabilities built-in to the fault management architecture (FMA), and when the two are combined, hardware problems should be relatively easy to diagnose and fix.
To configure the X2200 to send email when a hardware event occurs, an email server and recipient email address need to be configured through the ILOM interface. This can be accomplished by logging into the ILOM and using the set comand to configure a recipient and an SMTP server:
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/mail/receiver1 EmailAddress=ops@prefetch.net
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/mail SMTPServer=1.2.3.4
The X2200 also provides a facility to send syslog messages when a hardare event occurs. To configure the X2200 to generate a syslog message in response to a hardware event, the set command can be run to enable syslog events, and to configure the destination syslog server:
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/SEL ipaddress=1.2.3.4
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/SEL status=enable
Once a syslog destination and email server are configured, the set command can be used to enable hardware events. The following set commands will enable hardware events for all sensor types (e.g., fans, CPUs, memory, etc.) and enable email and syslog notifications:
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/PEF/EventFilterTable1 SensorType=all
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/PEF/EventFilterTable1 SendAlert=enable
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/PEF/EventFilterTable1 SendMail=enable
/SP -> set /SP/AgentInfo/PEF/EventFilterTable1 Status=enable
This is good stuff, but there is one downside with the X2200 ILOM (well, actually, there are a lot more, but I will discuss those in a future blog entry). There is currently no way to generate test events from the ILOM, or through the web interface. This is a huge issue IMHO, and it’s unfortunate that Sun didn’t include this in the X2200 ILOM software (most of the other galaxy servers support this, not sure why the X2200 had to be different). Hopefully Sun will address this glaring issue in a future code release.