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Kostas G. Gavrielidis (GSE-MSE) Master Technologist HP Services
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All HP Alpha systems running the OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX, and the
Linux operating systems come with the System Reference Manual (SRM) console
subsystem in their firmware, perhaps along with other consoles such as the
ARC/AlphaBIOS console. The SRM has control of the system hardware and provides
the following features (please see the Alpha Architecture Reference Manual for
more details):
- Initializes, tests, and prepares the hardware platform for system software
- Loads in memory and starts the execution of the system software
- Controls and monitors the state changes of all processors
- Provides services to system software that simplify system software control of, and access to platform hardware
- Provides a monitor and control of the system
The Privileged Architecture Library (PALcode) provides a
mechanism to implement a range of functions, provided by the SRM, consistently
without microcode. These functions range from the binary encoding of the
instruction and data to the execution mechanisms and synchronization
primitives.
Some of the more useful SRM commands (at the ">>>" prompt), include: show device, show config | more, e pc, e sp, e ps, e r26, crash,
halt, init, boot, memtest, memexer_mp, show fru, sys_exer, test, and wwidmgr.
Here is the SRM command to show all devices.
This is the SRM command to show hardware configuration.
Here is the command for examining the pc, sp, ps and r26 registers.
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An environment variable is a name and value association that
is maintained by the console program. There are two types of environmental
variables: volatile and nonvolatile. The volatile variables are initialized to
their default by a system reset, and the nonvolatiles remain as set across
system power cycles. Alpha systems have a variety of variables with values set
up within the SRM system console. These environment variables control the
particular behavior of the console program and the system hardware, the
particular console interface presented to the operating system, various default
values for the operating system bootstrap, and related control mechanisms. In
other words, ''the environment variables provide an easily extensible mechanism
for managing complex console state.''
Most users will never see or have a need to use the console
system on the Alpha platforms. Technologists who provide proactive consulting
and support to the customer production environments, however, must know the
settings of certain important console variables such as: auto_action, boot_dev, booted_dev,
boot_file, booted_file, boot_osflags, booted_osflags,
console, os_type, pal, and sys_serial_num. The specific
number and names of these variables vary from platform to platform and by
firmware version.
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The console prompt varies from ">>>" to "Pnn>>>"
where nn is the 00 | 01 | 02 | ... | nn CPU processor.
Several methods are available to get to the console:
To control the behavior of the system hardware, SRM provides
a variety of environment variables as a means of managing the system states. For
a complete list of all the console environment variables and their values issue
the command "show *" from the console prompt "P00>>>".
One of the tools that allows console access among other
things is ConsoleWorks[3]
by TECSys Development Inc. (TDi). Figure 1 shows HTTP access to ConsoleWorks. The
port used by ConsoleWorks is 5176, and normally the path to it will be similar
to the URL: http://hostname.domain.com:5176/.
Figure 1 - ConsoleWorks Web interface
Once connected, choose the top menu option manage → Consoles → Show Consoles to
get a list of all configured and available consoles to connect to. The
resulting screen will be similar to Figure 2 below.
Figure 2 - Available consoles
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Another method of getting and setting the values of the
console variables involves the /sbin/consvar program.
Obtain a verbose (-v option) of all variables with their values (-l option):
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The two tools used by HP Services professionals to collect
AlphaServer system configuration information are the sys_check for HP Tru64 UNIX and the VMS_Check[4]
for HP OpenVMS platforms.
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The sys_check tool gets the console variables on HP Tru64 UNIX systems. The following window
(fig. 6) represents a typical report of the information collected by sys_check.
Figure 6 - sys_check report on the console variables
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The VMS_Check tool gets the console variables on HP OpenVMS systems. The following window
(fig. 7) represents a portion of the information provided by VMS_Check on the HTML generated code
as it is viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Figure 7 - VMS_Check report of the console variables
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There are several methods available to update the SRM
firmware, depending of the Operating System. One method, that is common to all,
involves creating a bootable firmware update CD-ROM from an ISO image available
from the URL: http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/firmware/,
and then booting the system from the created bootable CD-ROM.
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This article explored the Alpha SRM console and the different
ways to access it and to set and retrieve the values of the console environment
variables.
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The author wishes to acknowledge his GSE-MSE colleagues
Laurence Oberman and Joe Bowker for providing access to the ConsoleWorks
configurations on Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS systems in the MSE interoperability
lab. In addition, I would like to thank Ken W. Campbell, Bayard W. Wenzel, and
Ken Sullivan, also from GSE-MSE, for their review of this article and for their
valuable feedback and contributions.
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Kostas G. Gavrielidis works in GSE-MSE
which is part of HP Services Customer Support and has been at HP for more than
22 years. Currently, and for the last 12 years, he is involved with the MSE
proactive consulting projects for our customer production Database Management
systems, and he works on the analysis and performance improvements for SAP R/3,
Oracle, Rdb, Ingres, SYBASE, SQL Server on UNIX, Linux, OpenVMS, and Windows platforms.
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[1]ssh (secure shell) is a program for logging into a remote system and for executing commands on the remote system. It is intended to replace rlogin and rsh, and provide secure
encrypted communications between two un-trusted hosts over an insecure network.
[2] A boot loader or boot manager is a program that loads the image of the operating system to be run on a particular hardware platform. Other boot loaders include the GNU's Grand
Unified Boot Loader (GRUB), the Linux Loader (LiLo), the Windows NT loader (NTLDR), the aboot loader, the Alpha miniloader (MILO), Initial System Loader (ISL) for PA-RISC systems, Extensible Firmware
Interface (EFI) for Itanium systems.
[3] ConsoleWorks is developed by TECSys Development Inc.
(TDi), and it is a Web-based enterprise event monitoring, event management and
regulatory compliance software solution. It provides secure remote monitoring
and management for enterprise networks, server, devices and applications. Additionally
captures, audits and logs console data from these devices. For more details see
the URL: http://www.tditx.com/consoleworks.html
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