Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Solaris Multipathing, System Bus pages updated

I updated the Solaris Multipathing and System Bus pages. We tripped over an issue with editing the scsi_vhci.conf for a third party storage device. The syntax is incredibly picky and wants new entries to be padded out with spaces, as I describe in the updated page.

--Scott

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Scott,

I've found the Princeton website to be most informative and my primary source for Solaris. Thanks to you and the staff for such diligence and comprehensiveness.

In my reading I came across something on the /etc/inittab page. In Solaris 10, I think the is:3:initdefault: has been replaced by the following:

smf::sysinit:/lib/svc/bin/svc.startd >/dev/msglog 2<>/dev/msglog < /dev/console

I think that's the case, but please let me know if I'm wrong.

Sincerely,
--Todd Dennison
UNIX Admin
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.
East Hanover, NJ
todd.dennison@novartis.com

ScottCromar said...

Thanks for the kind comments, Todd. Let me know if you see any other anachronisms that haven't been updated for Solaris 10. Every time I think I have them all, another one pops up.

I'll update the blog when the updated page is posted.

--Scott

Ashay said...

Hi,

I am playing with Solaris 10 build 70b on x86.

I have 2 Emulex Fibre cards and can see my EMC SAN disks. However, I am not able to configure multipath.

I have edited scsi_vhci.conf(correctly I think) to add our EMC 5671 device and enabled multipathing in fp.conf

But I do not see any output from "mpathadm list LU" .

Any ideas?

ScottCromar said...

Hi, ashay.

When we did this, we had a lot of trouble with the extraordinarily picky syntax on the scsi_vhci.conf. We ended up opening service calls with both EMC and Sun to get the problem resolved.

At the end of the process, we discovered that we needed to pad the entries with spaces to 8 and 16 characters, respectively (as I described in the web page). Sun assured us that this was not necessary, but things suddenly took off and started working when we did. I notified both Sun and EMC of what we had done and gave them copies of our working config files; I would hope that they would have used the information to update their problem resolution databases.

You are welcome to send me email at the contact email on the blog. I would be happy to provide you with files containing the working portions of our config so that you can compare them to what you have.

--Scott