SUMMARY: Diagnosing totally dead E450 after A/C failure -- no p ower lights at all

Thankfully, no hardware was damaged.  The problem turned out to be faulty
power on site.  We had short but severe storms in the area last night, and
parts of our building lost power.  My best guess now is that the machine
couldn't draw enough current to power on, so it stayed in "door-stop" mode.

A multimeter, as Michael suggested, could have confirmed this, but before I
could track one down they fully restored power to the site.

I'm still puzzled about why the LED's on the back of the power supply
wouldn't come on -- machines in the same room and on the same surge
protector were functioning.  I even at one point shut the other machines
down and tried to bring just the E450 up, still no luck. 

Most advice suggested a blown power supply (I swapped in two known good ones
to no avail), a crispy E450 (thankfully not, though that was what I feared
for awhile), a thermal sensor that shut things down (my original fear, never
did find documentation about resetting it), and a loose case cover (that one
had gotten me in the past, though for reference if the case is loose you
will still get power supply LEDs), fuses/breakers in room, etc...

Many people suggested calling Sun, which I did.. By the time I got a call
back (just a couple hours), the power had been fixed and everything was
fine.

Thanks to all who provided such prompt advice, I was really starting to
worry about the box.

The moral of the story is connect your servers to UPS's and have them power
down when power goes out.  I've requested UPS's for some time now, maybe I
can get the budget for some after this storm.

Thanks to:

Jonathan Loh
Mark Lewis
Michael Schulte
Allan West
matheny-sunmanagers@dbaseIV.net
William Yodlowsky
Kevin Colagio
Mike Peppard
Mike Selhi
Mike Kiernan


-Scott



-----Original Message-----
From: Scott McCool 
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 9:13 AM
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: Diagnosing totally dead E450 after A/C failure -- no power
lights at all



I have an E450 that sits in a small room.  Over the weekend the air
conditioning went out, and I got in this morning to find the machine totally
off.

Other machines in the room are fine and never lost power, I've tried various
power outlets.

The E450 does not seem to be getting power at all -- the power supply lights
on the back stay off and no fans or anything ever come on.  The front lights
stay off.

I physically swapped the positions of the two power supplies and have tried
other power cables.

My fear is the machine overheated and something either died or just shut
down.  What can I do to diagnose this?  What might cause this?

Many thanks in advance, I will certainly summarize.

-Scott