troubleshooting before hard reset

[Eugene Grosbein]

15.01.2018 16:31, Marko Cupać wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> one of my ageing servers, HP DL380g5, which is serving a bunch of
> non-critical production jails on FreeBSD 11.1, bacame inaccessible over
> weekend. I have physical access, its disks and NICs are showing
> activity, but it doesn't send anything to monitor over VGA, also I
> guess it doesn't recognise keyboard (num lock led does nothing).
> 
> Before I hard reset it, is there anything I can do to troubleshoot the
> problem? I tried serial port as well but it gives nothing on either
> 9600 or 115200 baud. I guess OS needs to be configured beforehand for
> serial access.

Yes.

If keyboard seems to be dead and there is no video output, I'm afraid
you can't get anything useful from the box other than sniffing traffic
from its MAC address, if any. And check MAC address table of network switch
for server's MAC address if you have managed switch. Else, just reset it.