topic mkboot mirroring question in Operating System - HP-UX

mkboot mirroring question

Frank Copeland — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:57:29 GMT

Question is, what steps are nessecary for my VM host to reboot in single disk fashion on the event of failure of the other disk of a 2 disk mirrored pair?

I recently went through a receipe for mirroring vg00 on our new itanium server running ux 11.23. This is the host server of a VM configuration that includes 3 guests. All three VM guests on this server boot from SAN attached EVA LUNs, thus no mirroring really required, but the HOST server OS runs on scsi disks inside the enclosure itself. In one of the early steps (5) it called out running:
>mkboot -a "boot vmunix -lq" /dev/rdsk/c2t?d?
>mkboot -a "boot vmunix -lq" /dev/rdsk/c1t?d?

I didn't do that but I performed all other steps after that to copy Service Partitions and create and extend the new disk into vg00 with the original vg00 disk. Looking at my notes I realize I SHOULD have included these two mkboot commands so my host server would boot automatically even after the loss of one of the drives in this mirrored pair. FYI: I have checked vgdisplay / lvdisplay output and see that we have good mirrors of all LV's on vg00.

rephrase of orignial question: Do I have to vgreduce one of the extra mirrored drives from vg00 then re-perform all the steps of mirroring under itanium again?
OR....
If I just run
> mkboot -a "boot vmunix -lq"
on both of the disks would that be all that's required to make sure both disks will boot without joining a quorum with the other (in the event of single disk failure)?

Re: mkboot mirroring question

Emil Velez — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:43:38 GMT

Should be able to just do the mkboot command once the system is booted. It writes to the boot area not the rest of the disk.

Re: mkboot mirroring question

skt_skt — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:37:39 GMT

also try that command on the alt disk first and you know soon there is no effect to data .

what does "efi_ls -d /dev/dsk/cxtydz" retursn now from both disks

Re: mkboot mirroring question

Frank Copeland — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:54:58 GMT

Thanks for your responses. I took the advice of running the mkboot command on the alt disk first. Then I ran the efi_ls and here are the results:
[/roots] uxvmadm1-ROOT->efi_ls -d /dev/dsk/c15t1d0
efi_ls: invalid efi device

I also tried running it on the raw device "rdsk/c15t1d0" with same results. I'm not well versed on efi_ls knowledge either as you can tell. I'll investigate further but if you have a response soon I'll be looking for it. Thanks so far to you both.

Re: mkboot mirroring question

Torsten. — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:40:58 GMT

How to write the AUTO file to the boot disk in 11.23?

# echo "boot vmunix -lq" > /tmp/AUTO.lq
# efi_cp -d /dev/rdsk/c15t1d0s1 /tmp/AUTO.lq /EFI/HPUX/AUTO

How to check the AUTO file in 11.23?

# efi_cp -d /dev/rdsk/c15t1d0s1 -u /EFI/HPUX/AUTO /tmp/AUTO.pri

# cat /tmp/AUTO.pri

Re: mkboot mirroring question

Frank Copeland — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:03:01 GMT

Again thanks for all your responses. Doing some house keeping this morning and see I left a few opened. The problem was resolved.

Re: mkboot mirroring question

Frank Copeland — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:04:18 GMT

Thank you