How to temporarily disable the LAN card protection

[Enrico Venturi]

Hello colleagues,
I've a cluster where each node has 3 LAN cards configured + 1 LAN card not configured; the last one is the standby LAN card, which acts as a backup when a fault occurs in each of the other ones.
I want to disable the protection for one of the configured LAN cards.
Which is the fastest and simples way without reconfiguring the cluster? (i.e. without to redefine the control.sh).
I think that to do "#ifconfif lan4 down" is a good way because the intentional disable isn't detected as a fault by MC/SG, is it ok?

thanks a lot
Enrico

[Michael Steele_2]

"....ifconfig lan4 down..." came up during failover testing when hooking up new servers at a contract I worked on, and was dismissed as a valid failover test because a HW fault is not in the O/S but in the package.conf file. Remember, the SG biniaries are controlling the server's resources, not the typical O/S daemons. And then "ifconfig lan4 down..." would confuse the SG biniaries. So the package.conf file has to be updated with the new LAN configuration, you'll then have to rerun cmmakepkg, cmcheckconf, cmapplyconf and ftp the new package over to the other nodes, etc.

[melvyn burnard]

well if the 4th lan is configured as a backup for ALL the other lans, then if you disable it for one, you disable it for all.
One way would be to assign an ip address temporarily. But you MUST remember to remove the ip and unplumb it again. This would need to be run on EACH node in the cluster.
If you wish to remove the backup activity for only ONE lan, you will physically have to change hte connectivity so the lan you do NOT wish to have backup for cannot talk to that lan via the switch/hub/bridge equipment.
of course another way is simply disconnect the standby labs

[Stephen Doud]

You didn't specify whether lan4 was a data LAN or the standby LAN.

Since using ifconfig to down a LAN card does not fool serviceguard into thinking the card cannot transmit, and therefore switch to the standby NIC, then your proposed method will work to halt the traffic on lan4, whilst not causing a standby failover.

-s.

[Enrico Venturi]

The LAN4 I specified is the active one ... is the one which isn't "stable" and I want to no more take care of it, so I think that if it's disabled the standby card, the lan3, doesn't switch anymore to protect it.

thank you
enrico