Hardware diagnostics can be performed on all NIM clients using a diagnostic boot image from a NIM server, rather than booting from a diagnostic tape or CD-ROM. This is useful for standalone clients, because the diagnostics do not have to be installed on the local disk. Diagnostic support comes from a SPOT resource.
To perform the diag operation from the client, enter:
nimclient -o diag -a spot=SPOTName
To perform the diag operation from the master, enter:
nim -o diag -a spot=SPOTName MachineObjectName
After you have enabled the client to perform a diagnostic boot, you can verify the success of the operation by querying the client's control state (Cstate).
nimclient -l -l ClientMachineObjectName
lsnim -l ClientMachineObjectName
If the operation is successful, output similar to the following is displayed:
Cstate = Diagnostic boot has been enabled
For the client to boot the diagnostics, you need to reboot the client. If it is a diskless or a dataless client, you have already defined a network adapter as the default boot device (BOOTP request), so no additional action is required. For a standalone machine, the boot list for normal boot lists the hard disk as the primary boot device, so you must follow the Booting a Machine Over the Network procedure .
In addition to using the procedure in the previous section, diskless and dataless clients have another way of loading diagnostics from the network. You can boot a diskless or dataless client from the network the same way you do for normal use, but with the machine's key mode switch in the Service position. If the client's key mode switch is in the Service position at the end of the boot process, hardware diagnostics from the server's SPOT are loaded. If a standalone client boots with the key mode switch in the Service position, the diagnostics (if installed) are loaded from the hard disk.