Tag Archives: device

Solaris 8 SAN Frustrations

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Getting Solaris 8 to light up a Qlogic QLA2310 Fibre Channel card using the SUNWqlc and SUNWqlcx drivers can be frustrating enough, but the headaches are only beginning if you want to connect it to a SAN and you don’t have all the right packages installed.

Last week, I installed the QLA2310 in a Sun Fire V210 running Solaris 8. I installed the latest versions of SUNWqlc, SUNWqlcx and SUNWsan. After doing a reboot -- -r, the system came up and attached the driver to the card. I zoned it in the fabric and logged into Navisphere, where the WWN showed up, but neither Power Path or the Navisphere host agent could communicate with the CLARiiON. I also could not see any of the LUNS I had presented.

I thought it was strange that the CLARiiON could see the host, but the host could not see the CLARiiON.

I ran:
luxadm -e port
Which returned:

Found path to 1 HBA ports

/devices/pci@1d,700000/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0:devctl                    CONNECTED

Clearly, it could see the HBA.

I ran:

ls -l /dev/cfg
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root  root   38 Nov 30 14:31 c0 ->
../../devices/pci@1e,600000/ide@d:scsi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root  root   39 Nov 30 14:31 c1 ->
../../devices/pci@1c,600000/scsi@2:scsi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root  root   41 Nov 30 14:31 c2 ->
../../devices/pci@1c,600000/scsi@2,1:scsi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root  root   48 Dec  4 13:49 c3 ->
../../devices/pci@1d,700000/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0:fc

The card was C3… This becomes useful later when we have to config it.

I ran:
cfgadm -al -o show_FCP_dev
Which retuned:
cfgadm: Configuration administration not supported

There it was… I didn’t have the complete SAN package installed. I hadn’t done this in a few years, so I had forgotten all the packages I had to add to get the Sun SAN package working correctly… There are many.

Happily, Sun has now packaged them in a nice “SAN_4.4.12_install_it.tar.Z”, which you can get from their website if you have a username. It installs everything for you in the right order.

The only thing left to do was another reboot -- -r and run cfgadm -c configure c3 to config the device. After this everything started working nicely.

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The iPhone is Still Not Quite There

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I’m begrudged to admit it, but Vasken is right in his claim that his Blackberry is better than the iPhone… For now at least. Having had the chance to play a little with Casey’s iPhone, I must say that the interface is wonderful. It is slick, intuitive and easy to use, but the device itself is lacking in some of the functionality that I would consider basic in a $600 phone.

Apple proudly boasts that the phone can play You Tube videos, but unfortunately you have to use a special player to do so. You can’t simply use your web browser to play them, which is a shame because it would be much more usable if you could. In fact, the Safari browser that comes with the iPhone does not support Flash media of any kind which certainly limits the user’s browsing experience.

The largest problem for me, however, is the lack of user enabled GPS. The phone has a GPS in it, but it is totally unavailable to applications running on the device. Again, Apple talks a lot about how wonderfully integrated the iPhone is with Google Maps, but its usefulness is greatly diminished because the device can’t tell Google Maps where it is. For me, the biggest advantage to having an enabled GPS would be for GeoBlogging, but just imagine how well it could work as a navigation tool if GPS was properly integrated. It would totally replace need for TomTom and other in-car navigational aids.

I think the iPhone is a good product, and I do believe that it will become the best phone / PDA / iPod / GPS on the market, but it is just not quite there yet. The product feels slightly immature to me, so I may wait for a few revisions before I pony up the $600 to buy one.

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Rebuilding the Solaris Device Tree

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If you ever shift around any bootable drives within a Sun Solaris box, you may find that either the device names (cxtxd0sx) do not follow the disk position within the server, or, the system just fails to boot because it can’t mount the other disk slices.

Let’s assume you are booting off of target 8 (c1t8d0s0), but wish to move that disk to the appropriate slot to make it target 0 (c1t0d0s0). You have changed all references in the /etc/vfstab file to reflect the new disk position, physically moved the drive from the target 8 slot to the target 0 slot, and changed the boot-device variable within the OBP to the appropriate disk. You should now be all set to boot from the disk in target 0, right?

Not quite yet.

Solaris creates a device tree with links to all the disks it knows about, and these don’t get rebuilt upon reboot. If you simply tried to boot the disk now in target 0, it would find the kernel, but fail to mount any of the other filesystems, because these device links are still pointing to the disk slices on target 8.

In order to boot off the drive in the new position, you will have to remove these device links and rebuild them. Here is how we do that:

1. Insert a Solaris 8, 9 or 10 cd into the hosts cdrom

2. From the ok prompt, enter boot cdrom -s

ok> boot cdrom -s

3. fsck the boot disk

# fsck -y /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0

Remember that your boot disk may differ than the example above. Since in our example above, we have put the disk into the slot for target 0 (c1t0d0), that is what we are using here.

4. Mount the root slice on /mnt

# mount /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 /mnt

Note that your root slice may differ than the above example.

5. Move path_to_inst

# mv /mnt/etc/path_to_inst /mnt/etc/PATH_TO_INST_ORIG

6. Remove all old device links

# rm /mnt/dev/rdsk/c* ; rm /mnt/dev/dsk/c* ; rm /mnt/dev/rmt/* ; rm
/mnt/dev/cfg/c*

7. Rebuild path_to_inst and devices

# devfsadm -r /a -p /mnt/etc/path_to_inst

8. Unmount the root slice and reboot

# umount /mnt ; init 6

You should now be able to boot off your old drive in its new slot.

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