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REMOVING LUNS and turning them back to the storage Administrators.

 
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Kennedy G. Doss
Regular Advisor

REMOVING LUNS and turning them back to the storage Administrators.

HP-UX Gurus:

 

I'm returning a bunch of devices (running into 200+) beloning to a EMC DMX Array from one of our HP-UX 11.11 Servers. I am trying to be double sure - before I turn them in.

 

a) I do not see any of the devices/ctd numbers that I am going to return in my /etc/lvmtab file

b) I have also made sure that the "pvdisplay" command run against these device numbers do not belong to any volume group.

 

What else do you suggest that I do before I return these LUNs to my Storage Team?

 

Warm Regards,

-Kennedy

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Matti_Kurkela
Honored Contributor
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Re: REMOVING LUNS and turning them back to the storage Administrators.

If the LUNs were used to contain sensitive information, consider using "dd" to write zeroes all over the LUNs that you are returning. (A more rigorous wipe might still be required before decommissioning the storage system, but even a single overwrite is pretty strong protection against accidental disclosure of sensitive data by configuration errors and the like.)

 

If you have the SYMCLI tools installed, use the "sympd list" command to get a list of the LUNs and their EMC identification numbers. Using these, you can identify the LUNs to be removed using the "native tongue" of the storage system (and the storage admins), which should make it easier for both parties to be sure that the right LUNs will be removed. If you don't have SYMCLI installed, you can use the free "inq" tool available from the EMC FTP site for the same purpose:

ftp://ftp.emc.com/pub/elab/inquiry/

 

(If I recall correctly, the middle 4 digits in the SER NUM field of the inq tool output are the LUN identifier for the storage admins. Anyway, the EMC storage admins should be familiar with the inq output format, so highlighting the LUNs to be removed and mailing the entire output to the storage admins might be helpful too.)

 

Run "rmsf -a <device>" on each /dev/dsk/c*t*d* and /dev/rdsk/c*t*d* device you are turning over - either just before the storage admins unpresent the disks, or after that. It is easier to do after the disks have already been unpresented, as you will see them as NO_HW indications in the ioscan list. But if you have some kind of hardware monitoring in place, letting the devices go to NO_HW might cause a lot of spurious monitoring alerts: in that case, doing it beforehand might be nicer.

 

Cleaning up the device nodes with rmsf will avoid the accumulation of old device nodes, and will allow the OS to re-use the freed c* numbers in the future.

MK
Kennedy G. Doss
Regular Advisor

Re: REMOVING LUNS and turning them back to the storage Administrators.

MK. Thanks for your post. You have covered a lot about the post removal steps as well which will be beneficial for a lot of us. Thanks for taking the time and writing back. What I was mainly looking for is - from the UNIX side if there was any thing else to double check if the list of removable disks are genuined. You answered my question.