One of your EMC Avamar nodes are blinking orange, what do you do ? Well the nodes themselves are rebranded DELL 710’s (GEN3) and all have an LCD screen with general status. The Dell servers also have a system event log (SEL) stored in NVRAM on the motherboard. Certain hardware events will be logged here or in the alerts event log. In either case, this will cause the LCD display to change from a pretty blue to orange. The display will show some error text of the last message written to the SEL. If the display is flashing blue, someone pressed the information button on the LCD display to identify which server you are working on in the rack. Press it again to stop the flashing and it will turn orange if errors are present in the SEL.
Dell uses Open Manage to monitor the hardware. You can use some Open Manage CLI commands to view the events and also clear the event and alert logs. This will change the display from orange back to pretty blue. Viewing the logs will show you what is causing the problem. Perhaps a disk has failed, there are Single Bit Memory Errors, the raid controller battery is bad or a power supply has failed. Avamar support will only send a power supply, disk drive or the entire node to fix a problem. Sometimes, a problem is intermittent and clearing the logs would be preferable to replacing the node. Here are some of the commands.
Log on with root and type the following commands:
View the SEL log
# omreport system esmlog
View the alert log
# omreport system alert
Clear the SEL log
# omconfig system esmlog action=clear
Clear the alert log
# omconfig system alertlog action=clear
View the disk status
# omreport storage pdisk controller=0
View the server setup
# omreport system summary
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