Sun Microsystems 280R manual Diagnostics, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting

About Communicating With the System

To diagnose problems with your server, you need some way to enter system commands and view output. There are three ways to do this.

1.If console output is not redirected to the RSC console, attach an ASCII character terminal to serial port A.

You can attach a simple terminal or modem line to serial port A. For instructions, see “How to Attach an Alphanumeric (ASCII) Terminal” on page 34.

2.Establish a tip connection from another Sun system.

The tip utility establishes a full-duplex terminal connection to a remote host. Once the connection is established, a remote session using tip behaves like an interactive session on a local terminal. For information about establishing a tip connection, see “How to Set Up a tip Connection” on page 183.

3.Install a local graphics console on your server.

The server is shipped without a mouse, keyboard, monitor, or frame buffer for the display of graphics. To install a local graphics console on a server, you must install a graphics frame buffer into a PCI slot, and attach a mouse, monitor, and keyboard to the appropriate back panel ports. See “How to Configure a Local Graphics Console” on page 36 for detailed instructions.

Note –If you lose access to the console, but have a local display and physical access to the server, you may gain access to the ok prompt using default NVRAM parameters. For more information, see “How to Use Default NVRAM Parameters” on page 178.

Note –If console output is redirected to the RSC console, you can also log in to an RSC account on the server by using the RSC graphical user interface, or start a command-line interface session by dialing in to the RSC modem or by using telnet. Using RSC has the advantage of allowing access to the server console and other RSC features even when the server operating system is not running. See the Sun Remote System Control (RSC) User’s Guide for complete information about RSC.

Chapter 6 Diagnostics, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting 159