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Physically moved - need to recable a rp7400

 
David Cider
New Member

Physically moved - need to recable a rp7400

Gents,

I was not involved in the initial setup of the RP7400, though I was involved in a rather quick move 10 months ago. Unit was in storage for about 8 months and we are just getting around to getting this system back on-line in our test lab (generic test system). I read the HW manual which goves *some* clues to connecting the power cables, I'm unsure which SCSI port goes to the SureStore disk shelf or DVD/tape drives.

Any and all help in makeing sure the power cables and SCSI cables are connected to the correct ports would be of invaluable help as I've never worked on/with HP 9000 systems before. Any best practices/tips/tricks/etc are most welcome. If we need to reinstall HPUX 11.11, we're still OK.

Also, anyone know which is the latest supported HP-UX version for this HW? Also what is the earliest HP-UX version for a rx2620 which we might be able to use as a fallback if it support 11.11.
3 REPLIES 3
Dennis Handly
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Physically moved - need to recable a rp7400

>which is the latest supported HP-UX version for this HW?

11.23 lists rp7400. 11.31 only lists rp7405 rp7410 rp7420:
http://www.docs.hp.com/en/5991-6460/ch02s03.html
http://www.docs.hp.com/en/5991-2701/ch02s03.html

>what is the earliest HP-UX version for a rx2620, if it support 11.11.

rs2620 only supports 11.23 and on.
Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor

Re: Physically moved - need to recable a rp7400

Welcome to the ITRC Forums!

Power cables: they should be three of them and you should connect all of them. Depending on configuration, the system can run with only two (or in a very minimal configuration, with only one), but it will show warnings about power failure in such a case.

Normally a rp7400 server has up to 2 internal disks (located in the back, in the lower middle of the rear panel hidden behind a metal grid) and a single external SCSI connector on the CoreIO board.

All the extra SCSI connectors are on PCI cards and are therefore optional extras, so there is no One True Configuration for them.

The system may or may not be able to boot from storage connected via a PCI card; it depends on card type and system firmware version level. Anything connected to Core IO should always be bootable, so usually the DVD/tape drive is connected to the Core IO.

You might want to try leaving the disk shelf unconnected and bring the system up to single-user mode: interrupt the boot sequence after the (usually rather long) self test is completed, type "boot pri" to the PDC prompt to boot from the configured primary boot device (usually the internal disk), answer Y to the question about interacting with ISL, then type "hpux -is" to the ISL prompt.

When the HP-UX has started up, you should see the root prompt in the single-user mode. You can then use "mountall; ioscan -fnkCdisk" to see the hardware paths of all known SCSI devices. You may see some error messages from the mountall command because all the disks are not connected yet; that's not important right now.

The ioscan command may show some disks as being in NO_HW state: these are the disks on the SureStore shelf that is not yet connected.

You can use the table on the page 159 of the hardware manual (see the link below) to map the hardware paths to PCI slot numbers: this may help in identifying where the disk shelf cables should go.

http://docs.hp.com/en/3687/rp7400_customer_hardwaremanual.pdf

The command

strings /etc/lvmtab

may also be useful in identifying which disk devices belong to which VGs.

After gathering this information, shutdown the system, then connect the rest of the cables.

Even if you don't get the SCSI cables exactly the same as before, the system should be able to detect all the physical disks. To make the existing VGs (other than vg00) on those disks accessible again you'll need to know the name of the VGs to export and re-import them:

ll /dev//group
(remember the minor device number of the group file)

vgexport -v -s -m .map
mkdir /dev/
mknod /dev//group c 64
vgimport -v -s -m .map

If you don't need the data on those external disks, you don't need to bother with this procedure. Just use the vgexport command to clear away the missing VGs, then reuse the disks as you please.

The rp7400 does support HP-UX 11.23, but it's too old to support HP-UX 11.31.

The rx2620 has Itanium CPUs and HP-UX 11.11 was PA-RISC only, so 11.11 cannot be installed on a rx2620. The only currently-supported HP-UX versions for it are 11.23 and 11.31.

Please see:
http://www.hp.com/go/hpuxservermatrix

MK
MK
David Cider
New Member

Re: Physically moved - need to recable a rp7400

Many thanks to you both for the info. Will give it a shot and go from there.

-D