1 Rookie

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14 Posts

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November 11th, 2022 11:00

Resetting flashing orange light without power down

I have an R730xd with everything on it in proper working order.

I have recently been doing some VM shuffling so added more drives in the front bay to create another Virtual Disk.  When I was done I got rid of the virtual disk, un-raided the drives in iDRAC and removed them.

As soon as I remove a physical drive the Health and Drive lights start blinking.  I have found in the past that the only way to  get them to go away is to power the unit down and unplug both power supplies.  This is far from ideal in a server environment.

Is there another way to reset the trouble light without powering down?

6 Operator

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3K Posts

November 15th, 2022 19:00

Holding identity button should reset on iDRAC not the system. Can you check the logs in iDRAC and see any other event happened that time which caused system reboot.

You can SSH to iDRAC and run the racadm commands to reboot iDRAC

You can refer below article on different ways of resetting iDRAC.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000126703/how-to-reset-the-internal-dell-remote-access-controller-idrac-on-a-poweredge-server 

6 Operator

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3K Posts

November 12th, 2022 07:00

You can reset iDRAC and check whether that is resolving the issue. If not you need to perform a reboot to fix the status.

1 Rookie

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14 Posts

November 15th, 2022 14:00

Thanks for the response.

 

I did see in the manual that pressing and holding the 'System Identification Button' would reset the iDRAC so I tried that.

Bad plan apparently.

That caused an unplanned server reboot!!!

Fortunately I had not put the server into production yet so it didn't impact anyone and after a consistency check of virtual drives and VMs all appeared OK.

The light did go out but...

 

Is there another way to reset the iDRAC that I'm missing?

Moderator

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5.4K Posts

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37 Points

November 15th, 2022 15:00

Hello 

 

https://dell.to/3TNKIgU

 

 

 

The iDRAC is able to restart without the server being restarted. You can use racadm racreset to restart the iDRAC. racadm racresetcfg will reset the iDRAC configuration to defaults. You should also be able to modify the password via RACADM if you have access. There is a RACADM CLI guide on the iDRAC support page.

 

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14 Posts

November 15th, 2022 16:00

Interesting.  I have not installed RACADM anywhere at this point as the iDRAC web interface and ipmitools have given me everything I need up until now.  I will explore these options so I have them for next time.

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14 Posts

November 16th, 2022 08:00

Oh that is excellent!  Very nice to be able to access the RACADM through ssh.  I'll test the reset when the system is quiet.

Nothing in the log about the event when the server rebooted.  The iDRAC logs don't go back that far.  Apparently I'm filling them up to fast by my ipmitool monitor task.  I should set up a proper syslog server and use SNMP instead of polling the ipmi interface.  It's on my to-do list.

 

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14 Posts

November 28th, 2022 10:00

Had a maintenance window on the weekend so finally had a chance to look more into the iDRAC reset.  It worked from the web interface.

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