SUMMARY: fan failure

My thanks this time go to :-

Tony Walsh
Hichael Morton
Chris Hoogendyk

It was rightly pointed out that this could have been a serious problem,
and by more luck than judgement that my E250 was still running normally!
I logged a support call with Sun, pulling out the fan tray and putting it
back seemed to do the trick however - no more messages and the diagnostic
indicator no longer lit - so perhaps a loose connection? Will monitor
things for a while anyhow.

Many thanks to those who replied again. The most comprehensive answer,
from Tony Walsh, is included below along with the original query.

Regards

Mark Mahabir


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 23:11:40 +1300
From: Tony Walsh <Tony.Walsh@Sun.COM>
To: Maccy <maccy@maccomms.co.uk>
Subject: Re: fan failure

Mark

 The first thing you should do is upgrade your OBP level to the latest version if you can (patch
106503). This will give you a set of the most recent diagnostics. Once that is done, power off the
machine, disconnection any Sun keyboard that might be attached, and attach a tty terminal to the
Serial A port via a null modem cable. You can do this with a real terminal, a serial connection from
a PC application or a tip session from another Solaris host. You will then need to  power it back on
in extended diagnostics mode by turning the key two clicks in a clockwise direction and then
watching for any errors that should stand out boldly on the screen. I think that the diagnostics
will fail and inform you of that failure with  much the same message as you have described below. 

 What I am expecting will be the failing device in this machine is the DC Distribution Board which
is the internal interface distributing power from the Power Supplies, to the mother board, the
environmental control circuits (I2C), and the SCSI devices (and anything else I might have
forgotten). You should also get the cables connecting these boards together, checked for continuity
as there might be a dry joint in there somewhere that could be dropping voltage levels on you. I had
a 250 with this message that eventually had all of its internal components changed apart from the
disk drives and the OS an I still did not exactly get over the problem (The machine got reoplaced
beofre I finally narrowed it down)

Regards Tony Walsh

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:
> When booting my E250 I got the message 'WARNING : fan failure' or words to
> that effect, although the machine booted up just fine and seems to be
> working normally. The diagnostic light has come on.
> 
> I imagine I will need a replacment(?) Is there any way to confirm such a
> failure? prtdiag doesn't give me any environmental status stats (unlike my
> other Solaris 2.6 machines) - even with the -v flag. Nothing in the
> messages either.
> 
> Any comments much appreciated.
> 
> Regards,
> Mark Mahabir