troubleshooting before hard reset

[clay at milos.co.za]

On 2018-01-15 10:40, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> 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.
> 

Have you tried remote console access via the iLO?
Sometimes that still works when the physical VGA doesn't.

\\Clay