Introduction
RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) Assist Service is used to monitor consumable components of your server such as UPS batteries,
fan etc. The service gives timely warnings to the user when these components expire.
The user may then choose to replace these components so that the situation of shutdown of the server
due to breakdown of these consumable components may be avoided.
You can login in the RAS Assist Service by using the login screen. This screen is shown when URL
http://servername/RASAssist/login.html is typed in the browser. The user has to provide a password
for logging in. This password can be changed from command line by logging in as root and running
the utility
/usr/sbin/RASSetPasswd -s password
On clicking this link the user is shown the status report of all the
components. This shows relevant details such as the Date of Installation,
the lifetime of component, and the status as Expired or Healthy.
The status if Expired is shown in Red color.
If the user keeps this page in the browser then it is refreshed every hour.
So the status of the components is at the most one hour old.
This report is generated by the RASCheckStatus.cron module which is a cron job
that runs hourly. So the latest status is shown only if the cron daemon is running and
the binary of the RASCheckStatus.cron module is present in the directory
/etc/cron.hourly
A component is said to be expired if it has been used for its full life
so that the Running Times (Hour) is over the lifetime or if the system date is past the
expiry date of the component.
If it reaches at the time before a definite period till the component is expired,
the remaining days (or hours) is displayed in the status.
In this case please confirm the replacement of the compornent.
If the Confirmed check box in the Dynamic Settings is checked, the status is Confirmed.
Otherwise the status of the components is healthy.
The warning about the expiry of a component is also logged to system log
i.e. /var/log/messages. So if the Status Report page is not loaded in the browser
then if the server administrator checks the system log, this warning can be seen.
The Static Settings refer to the information related to the component categories.
These are rarely changed because the change in the values such as
lifetime for these components will affect the calculation of expiry date for
all the components of these types.
The Dynamic Settings refer to the information related to each individual
component installed in the system. When a new component is installed the RAS
user can change the installation date of the system.
If any component is removed then this can be indicated by entering -1 as
install date or running time.
The date format is YYYY/MM/DD.
To change the dynamic settings click on the Change Dynamic Settings button on the report page.
The number of hours for which server is running since install is known as Total Server Running Time.
It is a value retrieved from system board when ServerView is available.
In other case, it will have a default value 0 when the user logs into the UI immediately after installing RAS Assist Service.
In this case the user should set the actual Server Running Time.