Blue beacon LED

Introduction to blue beacon LED

The Blue Beacon LED is a visual indicator feature designed to assist you in physically identifying a specific router within a rack or data center.

The Blue Beacon LED, labeled BEACON on the front panel of Cisco 8100 Series Secure Routers, serves as a visual aid for users. Its primary function is to allow easy physical identification of a router that requires attention or is being operated. By turning this LED on or making it blink, you can quickly locate the specific device among many, especially in dense network environments.

The blue beacon LED feature operates with specific functionalities:

  • The Blue Beacon LED can only be controlled via Command Line Interface (CLI). There is no physical button on the front panel to turn it on or off.

  • Once the beacon is activated (turned on or set to blink) using the CLI, it remains in that state indefinitely until explicitly turned off by a subsequent CLI command. There is no built-in timeout mechanism to automatically reset the LED to the off state.

  • After a router reload or reboot, the Blue Beacon LED always resets to its default off state, regardless of its state prior to the reload.

How to configure blue beacon LED

The Blue Beacon LED is controlled using a simple hw-module CLI command.

Turning the Beacon LED On (Blink)

To activate the Blue Beacon LED and make it blink for identification purposes, use this command:

Router# hw-module beacon R0 on

Turning the Beacon LED Off

To deactivate the Blue Beacon LED and turn it off, use this command:

Router# hw-module beacon R0 off

Get the Beacon LED status

To get the Blue Beacon LED status, use this command:

Router# hw-module beacon R0 status

Examples

To activate the Blue Beacon LED, connect to the router via console or SSH and execute the command:

Router# hw-module beacon blink

After executing this command, the BEACON LED on the front panel of the router starts blinking blue, allowing you to easily locate it physically.

To deactivate the Blue Beacon LED, after completing the necessary tasks on router, you can turn it off using:
Router# hw-module beacon off

The Blue Beacon LED on the front panel is now turned off.

Behavior after router reloads

When the Blue Beacon LED was set to blink on the router, if the router needs to be reloaded or powered cycled:

Router# reload

Once the router finishes its boot-up sequence and comes back online, the Blue Beacon LED automatically goes in the off state, regardless of its previous blink state. You would need to re-issue the hw-module beacon blink command if you need to activate it again.