UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Our SUn Solaris Server has crashed second time in 2 days, reason is not known , we are trying to determine what could have gone wrong, any ideas, the power supply seems to be fine, there is no response from keyboard,monitor etc and we had to do a hot boot yesterday..
Any suggestions what could be the cause??

Check that you have the option set to save the core.
Check dmesg for any errors.
Check /var/adm/messages (or wherever you send messages) for errors - errors should be right before the reboot messages start

Ask yourself, your team, your IS staff if anyone changed anything.
Use /usr/platform/sun4u/sbin/prtdiag -v and look for errors.

First steps might be to:

The server is not coming up, we switched back the power but no response from keyboard monitor etc.
When this happened yesterday we were able to bring it back by a hot boot.. what else could we try to bring it up, the support guy is going to be here only in 4 hours we want to try to bring it up...

What kind of server?

If you have the server documentation, it will have troubleshooting in it for these types of problems. If you have nothing on the keyboard when power is turned on (no beeps, or no lights flashing on num lock, caps lock...) then it could be a bad power supply, bad cpu. If you do get at least the first beep and some of the keyboard lights flash (before the monitor starts getting any messages to it) but you never start the boot or get to the openboot prompt, then it may be a disk drive.

Check docs.sun.com - they may have the documentation you need for your server there if you didn't save the hard-copy.

The keyboard lights flashed quickly for a second and went away, so you think this could be disk drive..

No. I don't know what kind of server it is yet. Either you can post the information and I can go look at docs.sun.com, or you can look at docs.sun.com for your server type, or you can wait for the SUN FE to show up.

I am only giving generalize information. Each server is different. E3xxx and E4000 servers have lights on the front which will be lit in different ways - you have to use the documentation to know what the sequence means.

Check out docs.sun.com - goto the subject categories tab - then the Hardware section - you will need to know what the server is after that (Enterprise, Netra, ...) Once you get to the right one (lets say it is a E3000) then you could look through the two manuals listed:

Ultra Enterprise 3000 System Installation Guide
Ultra Enterprise 3000 System Manual