Topics: AIX, System Admin

Use machstat to identify power or cooling issues

Not very much known is the machstat command in AIX that can be used to display the status of the Power Status Register, and thus can be helpful to identify any issues with either Power or Cooling.

# machstat -f
0 0 0
If it returns all zeroes, everything is fine. Anything else is not good. The first digit (the so-called EPOW Event) indicates the type of problem:

EPOW EventDescription
0normal operation
1non-critical cooling problem
2non-critical power problem
3severe power problem - halt system
4severe problems - halt immediately
5unhandled issue
7unhandled issue

Another way to determine if the system may have a power or cooling issue, is by looking at a crontab entry in the root user's crontab:
# crontab -l root | grep -i powerfail
0 00,12 * * * wall%rc.powerfail:2::WARNING!!! The system is now operating with a power problem. This message will be walled every 12 hours. Remove this crontab entry after the problem is resolved.
If a powerfail message is present in the crontab of user root, this may indicate that there is an issue to be looked into. Contact your IBM representative to check the system out. Afterwards, make sure to remove the powerfail entry from the root user's crontab.



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