ERS5500/470 Fan Operating States

[brazenhead]

Hi, several of our switches have 1 or more fans operating at a "warning" level. The fans appear to be working fine but it's hard to tell. Does anybody know what exactly warrants a warning level for a fan?

[Michael McNamara]

Hi Kmanuel,

Where are you seeing these alarms? In the event log? In some management system?

I don't believe I've ever seen a fan alarm from an ERS 5500 or ES 470 switch.

Cheers!

[TheKingSlacker]

We have had a bunch of Fan Failures.. I think most of them were generating the Fan errors due to low FAN RPM thresholds. Generally, a Reboot of the switch has clear the fan warning. We did have several that need a can of compress air to clean out the fans before the errors went away.. Then we had a handle full a switches that were replaced by Nortel (without any grief)

I would attempt to correct issue before there is a complete Fan or switch failure.. You don't want to hear you boss say "So, how long did you know the switch a had Warning alarm on it?"

my 2 cents..

The King.

[Michael McNamara]

On the subject of Avaya/Nortel replacing a defective switch. The Ethernet Routing Switch 4500 and 5500 carry a lifetime replacement warranty. I'm not sure if that also extends to the Ethernet Switch 460/470.

Cheers!

[brazenhead]

Thanks for the reply. The fan operating state can be retrieved using SNMP - an snmpwalk of the S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6 mib will give you all of the fan operating states for any Nortel switch. The possible values are:

other(1).........some other state
notAvail(2)......state not available
removed(3).......component removed
disabled(4)......operation disabled
normal(5)........normal operation
resetInProg(6)...reset in progress
testing(7).......doing a self test
warning(.......operating at warning level
nonFatalErr(9)...operating at error level
fatalErr(10).....error stopped operation
notConfig(11)....module needs to be configured
obsoleted(12)...module is obsoleted but in the chassis

Alternatively, an easy way to check the fan operating states for a switch is through Device Manager: Edit->Chassis->Fan tab.

Or 5500's with software version greater than 6.1 you can view the fan status with the CLI command: show environmental

I just couldn't find any documentation on what the warning oper state meant but low rpm makes sense.

Thanks again.

[Michael McNamara]

You got to admire a person that's ready to quote SNMP OIDs, awesome stuff.

I had to update the SNMP MIBs in my installation before it would recognize the OID. I copied the S5-CHASSIS-MIB.txt file from the 6.1 software release into /usr/share/snmp/mibs.

So yes there are 6 fans per switch so if you had a stack of 8 switches here's what the output might look like. You really need to walk the MIB with snmpwalk unless you want to code a script/application such that it reads how many switches are in the stack and then queries the specific OIDs for each switch in the stack.

S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.10.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.11.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.12.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.13.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.14.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.15.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.20.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.21.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.22.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.23.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.24.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.25.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.30.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.31.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.32.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.33.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.34.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.35.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.40.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.41.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.42.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.43.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.44.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.45.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.50.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.51.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.52.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.53.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.54.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.55.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.60.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.61.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.62.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.63.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.64.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.65.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.70.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.71.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.72.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.73.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.74.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.75.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.80.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.81.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.82.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.83.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.84.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)
S5-CHASSIS-MIB::s5ChasComOperState.6.85.0 = INTEGER: normal(5)


You can see that the index goes as follows;
  10,11,12,13,14,15 = switch 1
  20,21,22,23,24,25 = switch 2
  etc..
  etc..

Thanks for the information kmanuel!

[qazzie]

fyi there are known issues with fan alarms with those productlines. for example ERS5500 code 5.0.8 and below gives sometimes false positives.