I am trying to troubleshoot an xSeries 226 that appears to be having issues with the power supplies, but I can't seem to find information on the lights on the front of the system.

It has a built-in RAID which has green and amber lights beside each RAID drive, the green lights flash when there is drive activity. That part is straightforward enough.

There is also a light with a cylinder shaped symbol by it which appears to be a standard hard drive activity light. Although this only appears to come on during boot, since I guess the RAID drives' individual activity lights override this.

There is another light with a zig zag shape inside a circle symbol which I assume just means the system has power to it.

The question I have is what is the amber exclamation point light for? It is solid amber. It may have something to do with only having one of the two hot swap power supplies in the machine as I had to remove the bad supply so the system didn't keep cutting off. Can anyone find a manual or even something online about what that light means?

Only seemingly relevant searches I've found were experts-exchange links and I'm not gonna pay their $10 / month fee to find that one answer.

Thanks in advance.

4/13/2010 3:48:51 PM

if you only have 1 of the PSUs in the machine then thats why the lights on.

4/13/2010 3:54:23 PM

So basically the light comes on when everything isn't working perfectly right? Because the machine seems to run ok with just the one power supply. Its a 514W supply and I have the floppy and 2 DVD drives unplugged.

4/13/2010 3:57:46 PM

Yea. I have a few 336s with one psu each and the light stays on. It has the little diagnostic thing that pulls out and it lights up the missing psu. It comes on b/c its required for opperation in the event that the other psu fails, not because its going to use more power than 1 psu can supply. It wont care about cd/floppy drives missing b/c those aren't required for opperation.

4/13/2010 4:33:31 PM

Cool, thanks.

4/13/2010 4:42:55 PM

http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-56141&brandind=5000008

http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/selectproduct?taskind=7&brandind=5000008&familyind=5178870&typeind=0&modelind=0&osind=0&psid=dm&continue.x=1

If you can get to the BIOS, might want to check the logs there. Had a RAID card go bad in one of mine recently and was able to figure out from system logs what it was. "Slot 1 has been removed" ... "Wait, no it hasn't, its still there" ... "Oh crap..."

4/13/2010 9:42:39 PM

^Thanks for the resources, I'm still looking through the PDF in the first link

Is there a way to turn off the temperature sensor? My fans are running their asses off as if they are being incorrectly told that its too hot, and I'm wondering if that sensor has been the cause of the frequent shut downs and other power issues?

4/16/2010 5:00:46 PM

Try a BMC fw update if there's one. A lot of the time it maybe downlevel fw.

4/16/2010 5:35:36 PM

what kind of firmware is BMC?

4/16/2010 5:36:42 PM

Baseboard Management Controller, it's the fw that monitors temp sensors and lights the LEDs.

4/16/2010 5:38:42 PM

ah ok

4/16/2010 5:39:55 PM

it's probably because you only have one PS in there

servers tend to complain when that happens and they were designed to be redundant... it's more of an airflow issue than anything else.

4/17/2010 11:05:32 AM

Ok I think I need one of these to help diagnose things http://www.serversupply.com/IBM/NETWORKING/NETWORK%20MANAGEMENT%20CARD/REMOTE%20MANAGEMENT/73P9265.htm

Also I have heard that the cables that connect the RSA cards to the motherboards are harder to find than the cards themselves, anybody know if thats the only cable I'll need, or will I also need some serial, video, etc cables for feedback loop testing?

4/17/2010 3:56:34 PM