Periodic testing of the disk drives and battery are enabled by default. The disk diagnostics will perform disk error log analysis on all disks. The battery test will test the real time clock and NV-RAM battery.
Periodic Diagnostics are performed in different ways depending on the diagnostic version. Use the Periodic Diagnostics Task to change the test times or to add other resources to the list.
Periodic testing of the disk drives and battery are performed by a root crontab entry. One entry in the root crontab table runs disk diagnostics at 3:01 a.m. each day. Another entry tests the battery at 4:01 a.m. each day. These tests can be disabled by editing the root crontab file. The disk entry is /etc/lpp/diagnostics/bin/run_ela while the battery entry is /etc/lpp/diagnostics/bin/test_batt.
Problems are reported by a message to the system console and logged in the error log. Diagnostics must be run for a SRN to be reported.
Running diagnostics in this mode is similar to using the diag -c -e -d "device" command.
Periodic testing in AIX Version 4 is controlled by the Periodic Diagnostic Service Aid. The Periodic Diagnostic Service Aid allows error log analysis to be run on a hardware resource once a day. By default, the battery and all disk drives are enabled to run. The battery test is run at 4:00 a.m. each day, and error log analysis is performed on all the disk drives at 3:00 a.m. each day.
Other devices as necessary can be added into the Periodic Diagnostic Device list to run at various other times, if desired.
Problems are reported by a message to the system console and a mail message to all users of the system group. The message contains the SRN.
Running diagnostics in this mode for planar and memory tests is similar to using the diag -c -d "device" command. All other devices are invoked with the '-e' flag appended.
The Diagnostic Daemon diagd executes once the diagnostic package - bos.diag - is installed. The diagd looks for customized entries in CDiagDev (4.1) or CDiagAtt (4.2) odm database to determine which devices to run at which times. If no entries are present, ie, diagnostics has not been run at least once, then default times are given to the ioplanar battery test and disk drives.
Once diagnostics has been run, or the 'Periodic Diagnostic Service Aid' has been run to change run times for devices, the CDiagDev (4.1) or CDiagAtt (4.2) database is built.
4.1 --------------------------------- CDiagDev->Periodic = 9999 Do not test = 0400 Test at 4AM CDiagDev->Frequency = 1 Set whenever time is changed. although not used. 4.2 --------------------------------- CDiagAtt->attribute = p_test_time CDiagAtt->value = 9999 Do not test = 0400 Test at 4AM
The diagd sets a timer to wake up at the next scheduled time to run. Once diagd wakes up, the script /usr/lpp/diagnostics/bin/diagela is executed with the -t flag.
diagela checks the PDiagAtt->test_mode bit for the device to determine whether the device should be tested in this mode. If the bit is not set, diagela will not test the device. If the bit is set, then the diagnostics are run on the device with the -e (ELA) flag set.