Ibm

A week ago (September 02nd), I received a mail detailing the release of IBM’s new multipathing device driver for the DS4x00 series, which finally works with SLES11 (the available software up till now doesn’t – as in fails with kernels > 2.6.26 iirc). ESC+ notification detailing the release There wouldn’t be any trouble, if IBM (or rather the vendor providing the driver – LSI) would actually release the driver … up till today, I have yet to see the new version appear on the download page. I already tried to notify IBM about the trouble, but as usual there is lack of ways to actually get this to the right person. ...

I spent yesterday afternoon upgrading our TS7530, and in my fad I also upgraded TSM to 5.5.3. Now, once I started TSM it quickly started complaining about the paths to the drives. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR03 (/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape03) is taken offline. ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR03 (/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape03) is taken offline. HBA_LoadLibrary: previously unfreed libraries exist, call HBA_FreeLibrary(). ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR07 (/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape07) is taken offline. ANR8873E The path from source TSM1 to destination VTL1_DR07 (/dev/lin_tape/IBMtape-07) is taken offline. I thought maybe this is a mere device problem (we have had them before), so I rebooted the boxes. But still no luck and I went home after about an hour of trying without any luck. In the morning, my co-worker called our trustworthy IBM service partner, and the TSM consultant said he had the exact, same problem yesterday. We would have two options: ...

If you remember back to July, I looked into some troubles I had with the IBM RSA II adapter’s Java interface and the latest JRE updates. I just noticed, that IBM released a new firmware yesterday for the RSA. The ChangeLog states this: Version 1.13, GFEP35A Problem(s) Fixed: * Suggested o Fix for Remote Control General Exception in JRE 1.6 update 12 and above. o Corrected a problem that DHCP renew/release may fail after a long time. o Corrected a problem that remote control preference link disapears after creating new key buttons. o Corrected a problem that cause event number shows only from 0 to 255 when views RSA log via telnet session. ...

I just had yet another support call with IBM, concerning the Tape Console (or VE console, courtesy of Falconstor). My basic problem was/is, that I, as a german person, do have a german Windows Server 2003 installation. Now, if you do have german decimal number format selected in the regional settings, the display is gonna be kinda impaired and you’re gonna see something like this: VE console with german decimal number format ...

Well, after I finished my first OCF agent back in October 2008, we have it running in production now for about ten months. During that time, we found quite a few points in which we’d like to improve the behaviour with that Linux-HA should handle TSM. Shutdown TSM nicely if possible (Cancel client sessions, cancel running processes and dismount mounted volumes) Better error handling So, after another week of writing and testing with a small instance, I present the new OCF agent for Tivoli Storage Manager. It still has one or two weak points, but they are negligible. I still need to write the documentation for it, but the script should just work …

Well, after yesterday’s episode with our tape library today continued to be a taxing day. After restarting a few exports that were hanging yesterday due to our library problems, something similar returned. TSM was unable to locate a few (two to be exact) tapes in the library. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ANR8300E I/O error on library LIB3584 (OP=00006C03, CC=314, KEY=05, ASC=3B, ASCQ=0E, SENSE=70.00.05.00.00.00.00.0A.00.00.00.00.3B.0E.00.C0.00-.04., Description=The source slot or drive was empty in an attempt to move a volume). Refer to Appendix C in the 'Messages' manual for recommended action. ANR8312E Volume 000400 could not be located in library LIB3584. ANR8358E Audit operation is required for library LIB3584. ANR8381E LTO volume 000400 could not be mounted in drive DR6 (/dev/rmt0). ANR1402W Mount request denied for volume 000400 - volume unavailable. ANR1410W Access mode for volume 000400 now set to "unavailable". Yet the library reported the tapes were still inventoried. 🤷 Here we are again, looking completely baffled. After a short while trying to figure out what to do, we went through the Data Cartridge inventory again. As it turns out, through putting the library in “Pause”-Mode and restarting TSM multiple times, TSM apparently completely forgot that it had these tapes put into drives. ...

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom … Oh, and those RPM’s aren’t recommended or supported by Novell or IBM! After working with the novell-kmp solution, I think it’s actually rather easy to create a " Kernel Module Package". In the end, I created two additional KMP’s, one for the tools component of the VMware-Tools shipped with VMware ESX, and another for the lin_tape SCSI driver, used by our IBM TS3400 as well as the IBM TS7530. ...

Today I ended up working out the details on what we want to monitor regarding our BladeCenter. The most interesting details (for us that is) are these: Fan speeds for Chassis Cooling/Power Module Cooling Bay(s) Temperature Power Domain utilization It wasn’t * that* hard to implement. Only trouble(s) I ran into, were ( 1) IBM did a real shitty job with the MIB’s. If you look closely into the mmblade.mib, you’re gonna notice, that not a single OID is specified for the events. ( 2) As the MIB’s weren’t documented anywhere, I had to look them up via snmpwalk (which I had never used before). So as a reminder (to myself), here’s how it is done: 1 snmpwalk -v1 -c public -O n 10.0.0.35 .1.3.6.1.4.1.2.3.51.2.2 This will get you a list, with a lot of output (5154 lines to be exact). Lucky me, the web interface of the management module/ssh interface is rather verbose, so all you need to do is compare those values with what you are looking for. So for myself (and anyone interested) read ahead for the list of checks we are currently running on the management module.

Well, we finally had our maintenance window today, in which we planned the hardware exchange for our current Dell Blade Chassis (don’t ask!). The exchange went fine, but as we started exploring the components (like the IBM BladeCenter SAN switches – which are in fact Cisco MDS 9100) we hit a few road blocks. First, the default user name/password combo for the Cisco MDS 9100 for the BladeCenter is USERID/PASSW0RD (just as the rest of the password combinations). ...

As I did some switching today (between the new lin_tape version by IBM and our own lin_tape version), I ended up writing those lines a dozen times. Here is (just for me, if you don’t care .. skip ahead) on how to generate a list of commands: 1 2 3 4 5 6 for i in $( seq -w 1 32 ); do token="${i/0/}" path_prefix="/dev/lt/IBMtape12245775" echo "DELETE PATH TSM1 VTL1_DR$i SRCTYPE=SERVER DESTTYPE=DRIVE LIBRARY=VTL1" echo "DEFINE PATH TSM1 VTL1_DR$i SRCTYPE=SERVER DESTTYPE=DRIVE LIBRARY=VTL1 DEVICE=$path_prefix$((token+11))A1" done which should get you a list like this: ...