E3500 - Bad Disk ?

From: David Price (dprice@plugnpay.com)
Date: Thu May 08 2003 - 17:43:00 EDT


I am running the E3500 with 2 internal FCAL drives. 1 drive is slot 0 and a
mirror in slot 4.
Mirror is managed by Volume Manager. System is running 2.6

Complete history of the last month or so is as follows:

System crashed.
On reboot system complained that boot drive was bad. System and Drives are
approx. 4 years old.
Not knowing any better I, and not knowing how to boot off the mirror, I
removed the drive and placed the mirror in its place.

System them booted.

2 Replacement drives were purchased. With assistance from Veritas we were
able to put one of the new drives in the mirror slot (slot 4) and rebuild
the mirror.

Jump ahead 4 weeks.

System would not come up during a reboot complaining initially that the
drive had an invalid root plex and then subsequently that the drive was
offline.

Machine was then booted successfully off the mirror. Drive was flagged for
removal and then removed. A replacement drive was inserted and system was
rebooted after a 'touch /reconfigure' but drive can not be seen by system.
System complains that bus is offline.

At this point I suspect either the GBIC, Fiber Cable or the replacement
drive is bad. The replacement drive is most likely a refurbished drive even
though this was not stated at time of purchase. So it not unlikely that the
drive could be bad from the start.

The system has 2 I/O cards installed with 1 card going to the lower bus and
the 2nd card going to the upper bus.

I noticed that each IO card has slots for 2 GBIC's but only 1 is used. Also
the FCAL interface board also has 2 GBIC slots for each bus but only 1 per
bus is being used.

Would connecting all 4 GBIC's provide greater redundancy/fault tolerance ?

Does anyone know of a history of a Fiber Cable going bad over time ?

Are the GBIC's and Cable hot swappable ?

Thoughts and recommendations appreciated

I will summarize.

Thanks

Dave
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:26:22 EDT