Ibm

I was fighting with our VTL again, and TSM was thinking all the drives were offline. In order to update the drive status, you’d need to go into the ISC and select each drive and set them to ONLINE. Since I’m a bit click-lazy, I wrote a simple nested for-loop, which gives me the output to update all the drives at once: 1 2 3 4 5 for i in 1 2; do for k in $( seq -w 1 32 ); do echo "UPDATE DRIVE VTL$i VTL${i}_DR${k} ONLINE=YES" done done Result is a list like this: ...

Well it’s mid of July and the weather seems to be my friend. 25°C ain’t that bad. I really liked the weather last week (although everyone at work was bitching about it being tooo warm 😛) and would like to keep it (for the rest of the year of course!). Hrm, for everyone who loved the music within Kill Bill - Volume 1: Tomoyasu Hotei really rocks (playing Battle without Honor or Humanity). ...

Okay, so we received a brand new x3650 the other day entitled to replace one (or better two) of our NAS frontend servers. We installed Windows on it the other day (had to create a custom Windows Server 2003 CD first, since the default one doesn’t recognize the integrated ServeRAID), and we prepped the box during the week with the usual things. On Monday I started installing the " IBM StorageManager RDAC" MultiPath driver (since the box got two single port PCIe FC-HBA’s) and figured I’d be nice if we had this. I asked a IBM Systems Engineer of one of our partners, which told me generally there wouldn’t be a problem with Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) and the IBM MPIO driver. Only requirement would be that I’d install the new storport.sys driver (version 5.2.3790.4021) first (as in Microsoft KB932755). ...

Well, kernel updates on our Linux servers running IBM’s RDAC driver (developed by LSI) is a real pest .. especially if you have to reboot the box two times in order to install the drivers/initrd correctly. So I sat down and looked at the Makefile. Turns out, it just needs four tweaks in order to be working with a different kernel version (which you have to pass using environment variables to make). ...

Well, after yesterday’s lesson about getting the IBM RDAC to install for a not-yet-running kernel, I decided to take it a step further. Novell does have some documentation about KMP’s, which is actually rather good, especially the guide written by Andreas Grünbacher. After a short tinkering, I got it actually working. I was kinda surprised, at how easily it actually is. One problem I still have to deal with, is modifying the %post, to generate the mpp-initrd image. For now, the KMP only contains the default %post, which updates the modules.* stuff. ...

After some more tinkering, a lot more looking at the macros in /usr/lib/rpm/rpm-suse-kernel-module-subpackage and /usr/lib/rpm/suse_macros, I think I finally have a usable RPM’ified version of IBM’s Multipathing driver ready for use. There is still one major annoyance left: each time you install a new ibm-rdac-ds4000-kmp RPM, you also need to reinstall the corresponding ibm-rdac-ds4000-initrd package, as the macros in /usr/lib/rpm don’t allow for custom %post or %postun. As mentioned before, I’m gonna send them to LSI/IBM for review, and maybe, MAYBE they are actually gonna make use of that. ...

Today, after a short break (you can call it break, I think), I sat down and looked at the IBM RSA II adapter’s remote management GUI and it’s trouble with JRE versions. Ever since the last Java updates, I was unable to access the RSA console because Java would throw an error like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Initializing RemoteDisk v2.2 MCS v.3.6 initialized Established connection to rsa.home.barfoo.org:1045 Connected via socket: Socket[addr=rsa.home.barfoo.org/10.0.0.150,port=2000,localport=4292] Closing socket java.lang.NullPointerException at mcsClient.Row.isValid(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.invalidateIfValid(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Component.setLocale(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JPanel.(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JPanel.(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JPanel.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.Row.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.Options.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.McsToolBar.(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.McsClient.begin(Unknown Source) at mcsClient.McsClient.init(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Ausnahme: java.lang.NullPointerException In the end, I downloaded every version since JRE 1.5.0.11 (that is 20 different versions ❗), as wittnessed by Michael Ellerbeck that the last working version for him was JRE 1.5.0.11, and gave each one a try (since I want to report the issue to IBM, so that they gonna release a fix sometime soon). ...

As I wrote a few days ago, I started a new job. One of my first (voluntary) tasks was writing a shell script which would copy a VDisk Host-Mapping from a given host to another. This is useful, if you do have a lot of ESX servers for example and a few roaming ones. Now, if say, you need to do some ESX-Updates and you would like to add the roaming one to a given farm, you would be in a dark an deary place. You would be required to either click through the GUI a dozen times (in my case, it might have needed ~200 clicks) or type svcinfo lshostvdiskmap and svctask mkhostvdiskmap -force (these are incomplete command references) a few times. ...

Today we had (once again) hardware troubles. We ended up replacing a lot of things, but in the end it was a) the HBA and b) apparently some memory DIMMs. Now, that isn’t SVC related. However, we built in another HBA (from our Standby hardware), which apparently already had been assigned to a host. Now, since you can’t search for a WWPN (at least not that I know of), I ended up writing a little script (yup, AGAIN) in order to do that for me! ...

Out of necessity, another SVC shell script was just born. If you ever need to migrate a whole MDisk group onto another, you quickly discover the limited application of the SVC GUI. Now, you could query the VDisks using your original MDisk Group and then copy and paste the VDisk’s name (or the VDisk ID) into a command line and simply reuse that svctask migratevdisk command over and over. Luckily IBM blessed the SVC with an SSH interface. So again, we can write a (kinda) simple shell script which may look like this: ...