Brocade 24000 zoning commands hanging

[Alison Ayson]

I have not found ANYTHING which describes this error and what may cause it, so I thought I'd try this forum.

One of my Brocade Switches (24000)is hanging everytime I try to do any sort of zone command, including "alishow" or "zoneshow". I can run other commands such as "errdump" and "switchshow",but I can't display any zoning information.

The symptoms are that the command appears to hang and then comes back with the error:

groupshow ipcSendRcv Failed rc = -5

Has anyone ever experienced that error or do they have any insights as to what it could be? I'm assuming it has something to do with the Interprocess Communication but I have no idea what exactly that means. I'm going to call support but I was hoping that someone else might have an idea of what's going on.

Thanks,

Alison

P.S. I can't get to the web gui either. It just hangs.

[Paul Hawkins]

Hi Alison. Sounds like this switch could do with being rebooted and take a good look at the POST output. Have you got the latest firmware for this switch (5.1.0d)?

[Alison Ayson]

Paul,

Thanks for the reply. The firmware is 5.0.1d. Unfortunately I think you're right about the switch needing to be rebooted. All the hosts attached to this switch have redundant connections to our other switch, so they should be ok. I'll see what HP support says also (and I'll post a summary). Thanks again.

[The Spartan]

If you can post supportshow output may we could review the same?

[Alison Ayson]

Sometimes it's worth procrastinating! I haven't called HP support yet because, well, I have a million other things to do so I've been..errr...procrastinating.

I finally told myself I couldn't procrastinate any longer so I logged onto the switch again just to see if the problem was still there...and it's gone!

I have no idea what happened or why. I'll keep a close eye on the switch to see if this happens again. If so, I'll have to call support.

Thanks to everyone, sorry I don't have a summary to post.

-- Alison

[Martha Mueller]

Did you verify that your switch did not reboot by itself? We had problems with our brocade switches not letting us telnet into them after being up for a couple of years. A reboot fixed it. But, as you say, if you are set up for failover, it might have worked so well that you didn't notice. Our Brocade switches have started rebooting themselves. We think the cause is due to too much monitoring....we have been keeping a web browser open to the switch interface and kept automatically refreshing it. After a week and a half of this, the switches rebooted. Seems that we might have caused or found a memory leak from all that abuse. When the switch runs low on memory, it has to reboot to recover.

[Alison Ayson]

No, I never looked to see if the switch rebooted itself. At the time I assumed I'd get an alert if it had done so, which I didn't. However, we recently had to replace a blade (in the same switch) and I didn't get any alerts for that either, so I bet we don't have our monitoring set up right. Thanks for the info re: your experience with the director switches. I'll have to keep a better eye out (and configure the monitoring for major events).