APA failover on 11.00 using PCI cards

[Technical Services_1]

I have a large number of rp24xx & rp54xx systems that I am trying to configure APA failover on. They all have 2 PCI cards, one is on the core I/o card and the other is an additional PCI 10/100 card.
On the hpux 11i systems there is no problem with both cards using a BTL:AN driver, and APA configures OK.
On the hpux 11.00 systems, the core I/O card uses a BTLAN3 driver and the additional card uses a BTLAN5 driver. When I run lanqueryconf â s, it reports the following error message:

WARNING: None of the ports in subnet ( 1 ) have an IP address assigned
No Fail-Over Groups found. ASCII file not created

Ioscan details are as follows:
HPUX11.i
lan 0 0/0/0/0 btlan CLAIMED INTERFACE HP PCI 10/100Base-TX Core
lan 1 0/8/0/0 btlan CLAIMED INTERFACE HP A5230A/B5509BA PCI 10/100Base-TX Addon

HPUX11.00
lan 0 0/0/0/0 btlan3 CLAIMED INTERFACE HP PCI 10/100Base-TX Core
lan 1 0/8/0/0 btlan5 CLAIMED INTERFACE PCI Ethernet (10110019)

Using lanadmin, both cards show that they are running 100Mb, full duplex

The methodology and parameters are the same whether its 11i or 11.

[Xianjie Zhang]

Hi, there,

Did you check whether an IP address has been configured on lan0 or lan1?
Can you post the output of the following commands? If possible, can post the results for both 11i and 11.0 system?

#ifconfig lan0
#ifconfig lan1

"lanqueryconf" requires the primary port in a failover group to have IP configured.

Xianjie

[Ted Buis]

I don't think the internal core LANs are supported by APA. I think you need two of the A5230A cards. Check the product brief and look at the cards that are supported. Product brief for APA at:
http://www.hp.com/products1/serverconnectivity/adapters/apa_prodbrief.html
You might also check the www.docs.hp.com web site for APA manuals to confirm, but in my quick search it didn't mention CORE I/O for APA.

[Technical Services_1]

Thank you all for your views. I think everyone must have missed one of my previous statements. The hardware/software config thats fails on 11.0 works on 11i. Thats whys I believe its prbably driver related as on 11i both cards use BTLAN but on 11.00 the two cards show as BTLAN3 and BTLAN5.

[Ted Buis · Accepted solution]

Trouble shooting in the manual at:
http://www.docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4240-90016/J4240-90016_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4240-90016/00/00/10-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4240-90016/00/00/10-toc.html&searchterms=APA&queryid=20040729-084417

They mention some patch levels that are needed.

[Xianjie Zhang]

Hi,

I think I did miss the point (Sorry about that). After reading your original post once more, I found the following line interesting:
"WARNING: None of the ports in subnet ( 1 ) have an IP address assigned
No Fail-Over Groups found. ASCII file not created"

That means APA only found lan1 in the subnet.(And it is correct that lan1 does not have IP configured.)
There are 3 possibilities that lan0 was not discovered by APA:

(1) The driver of lan0 does not support APA.
(2) lan0 is not set to LAN Monitor mode
(3) lan0 and lan1 are NOT connected physically.

(Actually, there is the 4th possibility: there is a bug in APA :( and I will have to work on it.)


Since you said that the same hardware/software configuration is used for 11.0 and 11i, (2) and (3) can be ruled out.

As Ted mentioned in his post, in 11.0, btlan3 (the driver of lan0, core lan) must have at least a "HP-UX 11.0 Additional Core Enhancement rel of January 2000" to support APA.

You can run the following command to verify if lan0 support APA:

#lanadmin -x -n 900

If the output does NOT have a line contains " ppa : 0", that means lan0 does not support APA.

[Paul F. Carlson]

APA requires that all interfaces in a failover group have the same driver. Thus, in 11i, the driver being used is "btlan" on both interfaces. Whereas on the 11.00 box, one interface uses the btlan3, while the other interface is using the btlan5 driver.


HPUX11.i
lan 0 0/0/0/0 btlan CLAIMED INTERFACE HP PCI 10/100Base-TX Core
lan 1 0/8/0/0 btlan CLAIMED INTERFACE HP A5230A/B5509BA PCI 10/100Base-TX Addon

HPUX11.00
lan 0 0/0/0/0 btlan3 CLAIMED INTERFACE HP PCI 10/100Base-TX Core
lan 1 0/8/0/0 btlan5 CLAIMED INTERFACE PCI Ethernet (10110019)

[Xianjie Zhang]

Quote: "APA requires that all interfaces in a failover group have the same driver.
"

This is NOT true. APA requires all interfaces to have the same MAC type, speed and MTU. It does not require the same driver.

[Technical Services_1]

Solution was a critical patch, PHNE_24006, was missing despite being documented in the APA manual. The version of the BTLAN5 driver had apparently been installed from the Sep 1999 Apps CD and no patches applied. Duplex and drivers do not have to been the same for APA to work, but speed must. Many thanks to Ted.