ALOM is useful for troubleshooting a server that is not responding. If the server is responsive, connect to it and use standard troubleshooting tools such as Sun™ Management Center, SunVTS™, and OpenBoot™ Diagnostics.
If the server is not responding, log in to your ALOM account and do the following:
Although multiple users can connect to the system console from ALOM, only one user at a time has write access to the system console (that is, only one user can type commands into the system console). Any characters that other users type are ignored. This is referred to as a write lock, and the other user sessions are in read-only mode. If no other users are currently logged in to the system console, then you obtain the write lock automatically when you execute the console command. To see which user has the write lock, use the showusers command.
ALOM has a "watchdog" feature that senses when the host server's operating system might be frozen. The watchdog function periodically checks whether the host server's operating system is running. If the host server does not respond, the watchdog times out after a specified period of time. You can either use the reset command from the ALOM command shell to manually reset the server, or you can configure the sys_autorestart variable to automatically reset the host server when the watchdog detects a timeout.