HP Insight Management Agents 8.40 Managing ProLiant Servers with Linux HOW TO Whitepaper

Managing ProLiant Servers with Linux – HOWTO v8.40
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• A software or kernel application consumes all available memory, including the virtual memory space
(for example, swap). This can cause the operating system scheduler to cease functioning.
• A critical operating system component, such as a file system, fails and causes the operating system
scheduler to cease functioning.
• Any event other than an ASR timeout causes a Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) to be generated.
The ASR feature is a hardware-based timer. If a true hardware failure occurs, the Health Monitor might
not be called, but the server resets as if the power switch was pressed. The ProLiant ROM code might log an
event to the IML when the server reboots.
The Health Monitor is notified of an ASR timeout through an NMI. If possible, the driver attempts to perform
the following actions:
• Displays a message on the console stating the problem
• Makes an entry in the IML
• Attempts to gracefully shut down the operating system to close the file systems
There is no guarantee that the operating system will gracefully shutdown. This shutdown depends on the
type of error condition (software or hardware) and its severity. The Health Monitor logs a series of messages
when an ASR event occurs. The presence or absence of these messages can provide some insight into the
reason for the ASR event. The order of the messages is important, since the ASR event is always a
symptom of another error condition.
1-1-2 Console messages
When events occur outside of normal operations, the Health Monitor might display a console message
or log a message to the IML. Operational messages, such as fan failures or temperature violations, are
logged to the standard /var/log/messages file. Messages specific to device drivers (such as NMI type
messages) can be viewed using dmesg, if the system is not completely locked up.
The hp-health man page documents how to interpret the messages produced by the Health Monitor.
1-1-3 HP Integrated Management Logging Utility (hplog)
The HP ProLiant Integrated Management Logging utility (hplog) allows system administrators to view IML
pages. Commands are listed in Table 3.
Table 3: hplog options
Command Description
hplog –t Shows the current temperature and the threshold levels of all temperature sensors
hplog –f Shows the status of all fans
hplog –p Shows the status of all power supplies
hplog –v Shows the IML entries on the standard output
For more information about these components, see the online documentation by entering:
$ man hplog