Brand new Intel Xserve Intel - blinking yellow light

Question

Hello:
I was wondering if anyone had any information on this.
I am the design/production/IT manager at a publishing company where we just purchased a brand new Xserve Intel. It is a quad core 2.8 GHz model with 2GB of RAM, 80GB internal hard drive, and a few external FireWire 800 drives attached. It's been a truly great machine so far, but there are a couple of problems we've been trying to figure out since we got it out of the box.
Upon powering the unit up for the first time until present, the yellow system identifier light on the front panel of the machine has been blinking nonstop. It's following a pattern of blinking very fast 3 or 4 times, followed by a 1 to 2 second period of being off. The yellow indicator light on the right hand rear side of the machine has also been blinking with the one on the front panel in tandem. The operations manual indicated a few possible problems, including the enclosure lock being on or being in an alarm condition, both of which have been ruled out. Pushing the button makes the light blink very rapidly also, but with no pause in between.
Our IT consultant from corporate headquarters was recently at our office and recommended that I call AppleCare to ensure that there were no hardware issues with the machine. The technician I spoke with stated that the blinking yellow light problem can be any one of about 4 dozen different things but as long as we were all able to connect to it and haven't had anything strange happen with our files, we should be good to go. At that time, our files were still migrating from the old Xserve to the new one, but even with that being over, the lights still continue to flash.
The other problem we've been experiencing is while in the Server Monitor utility. On the main information screen, the server name is blank, the IP address is showing up correctly, and the status summary reads "failure to connect." The log is set to update every ten seconds and keeps spitting out a "failed to contact server" error.
Everything is appearing and working correctly in the Server Admin utility.
Any information regarding either of these problems would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi everyone and thanks for all the info...I'll check all this out a bit later on today and get back to you.
Just a couple of other general questions I had for now...I've done a little investigating and noticed a couple of things, I'm wondering now if I'd be better off just tearing this thing down and reconfiguring it...unfortunately the person that was sent out here from corporate didn't do the best job of setting anything up!
1. I noticed that we are hooked up to the second ethernet port vs. the first one. A couple of days back when I switched it to the first port, no one was able to sign or access the server.
2. I recall that the new Xserve kept crashing in the middle of the OS software update (not sure which build or version it was, but it was the version that was just over 900 megabytes). The original operating system needed to be installed a total of three times as a result of this, just to get us to the point where we're at now.
3. It appears that the LOM is the first thing that needs to be configured for everything else to run smoothly (although I could be wrong?)
4. The biggest problem we encountered was migrating our files from the old Xserve to the new. We have a base configuration Xserve and our drive setup is a 750 GB Lacie D2 Quadra that's connected via FireWire 800. The old drive the files were on was on the verge of death and we were fortunate enough to get all the files moved to it before it finally conked out. Permissions on about 75% of the files were wrecked and the only complete fix was running a third party software application called Passenger (http://www.macinmind.com/?pid=2&progid=1&subpid=1). This was the only thing that worked in its entirety to get the permissions fixed.
Thanks again for the info!