Amber Lamps!

Amber lights actually, to be a bit more accurate.

We’ve got these two IBM p505 servers that actually work pretty well. They were purchased on some kind of clear out two-for-one deal that my predecessor jumped on and while I probably wouldn’t be the guy to buy these machines in the first place, I’ve come to strangely like them. These server run our DNS, DHCP and soon-to-be LDAP stuff. It’s all distributed, replicated and zone-transfered goodness.

However, as of this writing they are both sportin’ a solid amber light on the LightPath diagnostics and the procedure to clear the amber light is… well… rather unclear. I think it’s unclear because we don’t have an HMC (Hardware Management Console) so we don’t get a lot of the spiffy external management features that these systems offer. Add to the fact that we run Linux on these hosts as opposed to AIX, which apparently has OS-level tools for querying the event log and flipping the light switches. I can’t find anything equivalent on Linux for p-Series systems… yet.

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