Thursday, February 7, 2013

Dell Servers, clearing the amber light

I run an environment consisting of Dell servers.  I'm quite happy with them.  They have some good management and monitoring utilities, and they've greatly improved applying things like firmware updates over the years.

This one was easy, but Googling didn't get me the answer, so I figured it warranted a post.

I had dealt with a nasty disk issue previously.  In the end, I recovered the server to health, but my original RAID1 running in drives 0 and 1 had to reconfigured to run from drive 1 and drive 7 as a global hot spare.  It seemed that there was a hardware problem in slot 0, and as the server is nearing retirement, it was easier just to leave drive 0 empty.

Some weeks later, someone else pointed out the "amber light."  I monitor my systems through OMSE (Open Manage Server Essentials) which relies on OMSA (Open Manage Server Administrator), and the server showed healthy.

Physical examination yielded "PowerEdge 2950 E1812 HDD 0 Removed."  Well, that was true, but I didn't need to see an amber light for it.

Going online netted me results like "Clear SEL" without telling me how to do that.

The quick and easy solution: clearing the hardware log.

From the OMSA web interface, from System, select Logs, and then Hardware.  Then Clear Log.

Voila.  Healthy blue display screen, no amber light.

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