If you have a Dell PowerEdge (mine is a 2600, but from looking around on the Dell forums, this issue applies to other models), maybe you have a scary-looking orange light blinking on the front of your machine which won't turn off no matter what you try.
The orange light is the ESM (Embedded Server Management) module trying to tell you about a hardware problem with your machine. But it will keep flashing even after you fix the problem (unplugged fan, bad fan, PCI-bus parity error, etc.).
Of course, if you are running Windows, you probably have all the Dell utilities pre-loaded on the machine. And you can get them for some versions of Linux. But I'm not running either Windows or Linux (I'm running Plan 9). It would be nice if Dell provided a bootable CD image with their tools installed, but they don't, at least not as of this writing in July 2010. But I did notice downloadable Linux utilities, and there are bootable "Live CD" images for various Linux distributions...
In theory, no matter what OS you have on your machine, you should be able to boot up a Linux Live CD, install the Linux version of the Dell System E-Support Tool (DSET) into the Live CD's RAM pseudo-filesystem, and run it, without modifying any state on any of your disks--almost as convenient as a bootable DSET would be.
After flailing around for a while trying to follow the directions that came with DSET, which didn't work for me, I reverse engineered enough to figure out these steps, which did.
- Grab a Fedora Live CD (I used Fedora 12, 32-bit).
- Boot it up (it takes a while!), log in as "liveuser", and launch Firefox (click once on the icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen).
- Download DSET (Dell System E-Support Tool) from Dell's web site (I got delldset_v1.9.0.131_A02.bin; your filename may vary).
- You can check to see where the file was stored: in the menu bar at the top of the screen, choose "Places" and then "Downloads".
- Launch a terminal (Applications, System Tools, Terminal).
- $ cd Downloads
$ chmod 755 delldset_v1.9.0.131_A02.bin
$ su
# ./delldset_v1.9.0.131_A02.bin --install (Be patient!)
# cd /opt/dell/dset/bin
# ./dellsysteminfo (Be very patient! This can easily take 15 minutes.)
- This will place a zip file in /root with a very long file name.
If you want to look at the report:
- Unzip the file somewhere (unzip /root/LongFileName -d /tmp/report; the password is "dell", all lower-case)
- Point a browser at it (firefox /tmp/report/dsetreport.hta).
- You may be interested in the ESM log: on the left margin, click on System, Logs, ESM.
- If you want, save the DSET report somewhere (on a disk, on another system, ...).
- To clear the ESM log (and hopefully the orange light too!):
# ./clearesm
@Copyright Dell Inc. 2004-2010 Version 1.9 build 131
* Clearing Hardware Log
* Unloading framework core
* DSET Instrumentation uninstalled successfully
- To reboot your machine:
# shutdown -r now - You probably want to eject the CD first thing when the system starts to reboot.
