"Tape Drive Status Change" alerts from 7.0 Insight Agents

[Steve Kadish]

Sorry, I forgot to update the thread. I don't have a very satisfying resolution to relate. HP tech support told me that the SCSI agent constantly polls the SCSI bus for status and that if the bus was very busy - as it presumably is while we have two backups running simultaneously - that it was possible it would return false positives. They recommended that if there were no actual problems with the SCSI operation, which there weren't, that I simply deactivate the agent.

Thanks,
- Steve

[Dan Raney]

You're right. That's not very helpful response from HP, but it's more than we've been able to extract from them. It's a little troubling, because if you disable the agent and you actually DO have a problem, then you don't have a very proactive way to find out about it. Alternatively, I guess you could just ignore the warnings as well.

Anyway, I really appreciate you coming back and updating the thread. Thanks very much!

[T Bell]

Anyone have any news on when new management agents will be released to address this issue?

We're experiencing the same annoying "offline/online" storage status messages, snmp traps, etc. on two new DL380 servers connected to SSL 1016 autoloaders.

[Dan Raney]

Hey -

We followed up with the Storage Works folks, and got this reply:

"...[since] these are direct SCSI attached, you can disable the SCSI Info from the HP Management Agents. This can be accomplished by going to control panel, HP management, then select SCSI Info then Remove. This will put SCSI Info in the deactive window on the right side. We don't recommend stopping the storage agent because there are other agents that will restart it, like the foundation agent. This was a problem in the 6.40 agents as well.

Hp Storage Engineering is aware of this and I expect a more permanent solution will be forthcoming."

[J_139]

Hello,

I am having the same exact problem. If anyone hears about a fix for this please let me know and I'll do the same.

Thanks!
J.S.

[Alain Staelen]

I have reported the issue again to HP support, I opened a new call and after a week I basically got the same response back from HP :
- disable the storage agents if it bother you
- no we won't fix it for you
- we are planning a fix for mid 2005 when we change the agents architecture.

This is unacceptable for us and I would suggest that everybody with the same problem calls their HP contacts and asks for a more "responsable" answer.

This is not an answer for a company that wants to deliver enterprise class support.

[Michael Jay_2]

OK, am I missing something here? We are being flooded with the same annoying messages. So on the SIM server I went into Options-Events-SNMP Trap Settings and went to the cpqscsi.mib, located two event named: cpqTape4PhyDrvStatusChange and cpqTape5PhyDrvStatusChange (these are the only two I could find that had the exact text in the messages we're getting) and set value to "NO" on "Enable Trap Handling" but we're still gettings the messages.

In the SIM online help in this same area it says:

Enable Trap Handling - Most traps are enabled. Trap handling gives you control over the volume of messages. Turn off nuisance messages, such as unnecessary informational messages, or repeated trap messages for an event that has not been corrected.

Isn't this what we're trying to do?

Thanks.

[Steve Kadish]

Michael,

What version of the agents are you running? Since we upgraded to PSP 7.1, I get these errors occasionally, always during very heavy backup periods when our library is working overtime, but I'm no longer flooded with false alarms. Is it possible that there is an actual problem with your SCSI connections or subsystem?

- Steve

[Michael Maiolo]

We have the same problem with all our MSL libraries as well.

Most of ours are Fibre attached through and NSR. So it's not soley a SCSI based issued.

There is an HP article, customer advisory EX040107_CW01 which descibes the insight management agents generating event ID 1192 during a backup. I suspect it's also the same issue causing the flood of message in SIM.

To the agents in appears that the library is going offline, then online again.

The fix in the article is to upgrade to 7.1 version of the agents.

My temporary fix is to disable that portion of the SNMP agent. You can still have the SCSI agent enabled on the server to trap SCSI errors of another nature, but through SIM disable the status change portion of the MIB. I believe that the trap numbers 5018 & 5019. (May be a few others also)

[Michael Jay_2]

Steve,

We're running everything from 5.5 to 7.0. I did notice that none of the 5.5 backup servers generate this error but 1/2 of the 6.4 servers do and all of the 7.0 backup servers do.

No, I don't believe there are problems with the SCSI subsystems. I believe, like others have stated, that these annoying errors only occur during backups when the device is busy when it is queried and so SIM reports it as offline and then 10 minutes later it reports it OK.

BUT, my point of joining this thread is to find out why (either what I'm doing wrong, or to correct my understanding)configuring the SNMP Settings for the traps to NO - under the Enable Trap Handling option does not work as advertised in the online help.

I am glad, however, to hear you get these annoying messages less with 7.1.

Thanks.

MJ