The easiest way to gather information about the status of the HSM is through the command line tool csadm. The csadm command can be used to perform nearly all administrative tasks, though we recommend using the much more user-friendly GUI tool CryptoServer Administration Tool. But csadm is very helpful to quickly see the state of the HSM through the use of the subcommand csadm getstate. An example of the getstate output follows:

shell> csadm getstate
mode      = Operational Mode
state     = INITIALIZED (0x00100004)
temp      = 33.2 [C]
alarm     = OFF
bl_ver    = 3.00.2.1          (Model: Se-Series)
uid       = b9000011 0c5f4b01                   |      _K 
adm1      = 53653130 20202020 43533434 34363835 | Se10    CS444685
adm2      = 53656375 72697479 53657276 65720000 | SecurityServer  
adm3      = 494e5354 414c4c45 44000000 00000000 | INSTALLED  

The most important pieces of information displayed here are the mode (Operational), the alarm state (OFF), and, to a lesser extent, the service tag (CS444685). Another piece of helpful information is that the command returned successfully, indicating the HSM hardware is recognized by the operating system and is responsive.

Here is example output from a non-functional HSM:

shell> csadm getstate
Error B9018016
      CryptoServer API LINUX
      ioctl error (locking)
      errno = 22