Strange mail message
Yannis Vamvakoulas
On an AIX 4.3.3.0.04 user 'root' keeps receiving the following mail
message:
---------------------------------------------------
Message 2:
From root Thu Dec 14 04:00:49 2000
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 04:00:48 +0200
From: root
To: root
Subject: diagela
A PROBLEM WAS DETECTED ON Thu Dec 14 04:00:47 WET
2000 801014
The Service Request Number(s)/Probable Cause(s)
(causes are listed in descending order of probability):
29A00003:Refer to the Error Code to FRU Index in the system service
guide.
FRU: 11K0459 P1/K1
--------------------------------------------------
I am relatively new to AIX, so do you have any ideas of what may be
happening? What is the system service guide?
The AIX box does not show any strange behaviour and I works ok...
Thanks,
Yannis
Ellerman, Scott [RICH2:2I38:EXCH]
> A PROBLEM WAS DETECTED ON Thu Dec 14 04:00:47 WET
> 2000 801014
>
> The Service Request Number(s)/Probable Cause(s)
> (causes are listed in descending order of probability):
>
> 29A00003:Refer to the Error Code to FRU Index in the system service
> guide.
> FRU: 11K0459 P1/K1
> --------------------------------------------------
> I am relatively new to AIX, so do you have any ideas of what may be
> happening? What is the system service guide?
> The AIX box does not show any strange behaviour and I works ok...
Does this box have a keyboard attached? I think P1/K1 is the bus
location code on PCI systems for the standard keyboard adapter (sioka0).
The system service guide is a book specifically about your model of
RS/6000, which would have the "29A00003" code in a table somewhere
giving diagnostic instructions. If you can't find your hardcopy, you
can probably locate it on
http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/resource/hardware_docs/.
What's actually happening here is that somehow an error has been logged
in the AIX Error Log (a.k.a. "errpt"), and there is a cron job that's
running the Diagnostic Error Log Analysis ("diagela") every night.
Every night, diagela detects that error in the error report and sends a
mail to root to get that person to do something about the problem it
found. Unfortunately diagela is about as smart as a sheep who's eaten
too much grass (and I don't mean the kind on your lawn), and so it will
continue to report on the same error over and over and over and over,
even if the error occurred only once, 20 days ago.
Look up the 29A00003 code in your service guide - if it says it's a
keyboard problem (as I suspect it will), then do 'errpt -a | more' and
find anything that refers to the keyboard or a device called "sioka0".
Look at the datestamps on those errors; if there's a lot of them and
they're recent, run diagnostics on your keyboard. If they're old
(meaning more than a week or two older than the day you look), you are
probably safe just clearing them out of the error log with "errclear -N
sioka0 0"
Once they're cleaned out of the error log, you'll stop getting the
emails.
--
Scott Ellerman
IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert - RS/6000 AIX
The opinions expressed herein are solely my own and not those of Nortel
Networks or IBM.