How to check hardware failure?

sanglih · 06-19-2002, 12:31 PM

Hi, I want to know how to check any hardware failure after RedHat loaded. Like DVD-Rom, ethernet card, and so on.
Any ideas?

shoot2kill · 06-19-2002, 12:37 PM

I am not too sure, you might want to check your /var/log/boot.log

sanglih · 06-19-2002, 12:43 PM

Well, as far as I know.. I thought somehow using I/O to check them whether they are well or not.
I just don't understand what that means.

shoot2kill · 06-19-2002, 12:57 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by sanglih
somehow using I/O to check them whether they are well or not.
I just don't understand what that means.

Could these be:

ping (input) the network, if u get a reply(output) which means your Ethernet device is good.

insert(input) a DVD or a VCD to play the disc, if the screen shows(output) the film, which mean the DVD drive is working fine.

finegan · 06-19-2002, 03:01 PM

dvd and cdrom seek read errors will appear in "dmesg" as well as a lot of the common network cards failures (which aren't all that common). In the case of the drives, unless there are A LOT of seek errors, I wouldn't worry much about it.

Cheers,

Finegan

sanglih · 06-20-2002, 10:30 AM

Thanks for all replies.
Maybe I should be more descriptive.
I am building this machine that doesn't have any monitor or keyboard. I just want to output when something happen to any hardware I am using.
Seems like really hard task to do this.
I think I am gonna output to printer(only if something happen).

I could write a small program to write to the printer when any hardware failure detected.
I just don't know how to check these failures.. I guess I will buy a book and read(sigh).

Thanks.

-Young

finegan · 06-20-2002, 04:43 PM

Offhand about every PC BIOS I know won't let the machine boot without a keyboard attached. You can boot the machine, yank the keyboard, and go from there, but its a quirk to a lot of BIOSes.

If this thing is going to be networked, the easiest way to have error reports is have a script called from cron that checks through the various logs: /var/log/messages for instance, for certain errors, like the word "error" and then mails someone about it.

Just a thought,

Cheers,

Finegan

mrGee · 06-22-2002, 11:47 AM

At the moment my good old pentium 133 is running smoothwall
and its booting without keyboard

and i use the
webinterface to shut it down. Just had to turn it of
in the bios.
When i recall it was: halt on all errors, except keyboard

sanglih · 06-24-2002, 11:43 AM

OK.. booting without keyboard is no problem since I am going to build it from picking up the board.
I am just wondering is there any (like windows) signal from hardwares when something goes wrong.
I see some program like GKRELLM that I could adapt.
GKRELLM has UI and I don't have any monitor.
I want my machine to be as simple as possible.
I can look at GKRELLM and change it to no graphic??
I don't know. ..

neo77777 · 06-24-2002, 11:47 AM

you can have a remote logging machine so all the logs from this machine will be sent to a logging machine, it is a matter of syslogd configuration

sanglih · 06-24-2002, 01:24 PM

Thanks everyone.
What I want to know is.. I think. If something happen to any hardware, it'll log to /var/log/messages. That means it knows before log the error..
How does it know? There must be something like "watchdog" for hardware in order to log the error. I think I can catch the signal before logging.