I’ve set up a few brand-new Xserves lately and two of them wouldn’t stop blinking their System Identifier light.
The System Identifier light would blink rapidly four times with a short pause and then repeat.
Normally this happens if you haven’t configured the onboard LOM, but for both of these machines I configured the LOM during the initial server setup assistant.
Using the Server Monitor application, you can turn on and off the System Identifier light, but this wasn’t working. Server Monitor was also reporting that everything with the server was A-OK, there were no errors at all.
The fix for the problem in my case was to reset the BMC using ipmitool.
You can usually access ipmitool like so:
ipmitool -U localadmin -H ip.address.of.server shell
This wasn’t working for me, it was telling me it couldn’t communicate.
On the server itself I simply ran sudo ipmitool shell which entered the shell for the utility whereupon I was then able to execute bmc reset cold
Voila! no more blinking light.
I have exactly the same problem. My question: What harm is there in doing nothing, and letting the light continue to blink, other than the annoyance factor?
No harm, as you say, other than the annoyance factor – and if it’s a client’s machine, having them always keep asking you “Why is that light blinking?”