Cisco Tells UCS Owners They May Have A Screw Loose – In The Server Chassis

Cisco has warned owners of its UCS servers that they may have a screw loose. In the UCS X9508 chassis that houses their servers, that is.

A field notice issued by the company advises: "The Power Entry Module (PEM) for a small number of UCS 9508 units might not be secured in the chassis and could be pulled out when power cord is unplugged from the chassis.

"The captive screws designed to secure the PEM were not correctly tightened and some chassis were shipped with the module improperly secured."

If you're the unlucky owner of one of those chassis, Cisco warns the PEM "might slide out of the chassis when the power cord is removed".

Ouch.

Cisco has offered a workaround, and for once you don't need to download and apply a patch. Instead, you'll need a screwdriver. But not just any old screwdriver, as this job needs a T10 torx head driver.

Cisco's instructions, depicted below, suggest an electric screwdriver can do the job if you can "torque to 4.5-6inlb", and leaves tightening by hand as another option.

Just screw it. Click to enlarge

Please don't try any of this until you have powered off any servers in the chassis, as well as the chassis itself. That's best done from the rack power distribution unit, since the PEM could fall out if you try disconnecting at that end.

Cisco's field notice states only "a small number" of the chassis have a screw loose. Nonetheless the issue is a tad embarrassing as the UCS X9508 is Cisco's newest chassis and was only launched a few months back to house its X-series servers that can be used to deploy storage, CPU, and GPU resources. The chassis has eight front-facing server slots that can hold what Cisco describes as "a pool of future I/O resources that may include GPU accelerators, disk storage, and nonvolatile memory".

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Let's hope Cisco tightens the screws properly on those future devices. ®