Ignite - SCSI port mismatch.

[David Myers_3]

We recently received a HP K580 and on booting the machine we were getting these
errors:
lvlnboot: Warning: couldn't query physical volume /dev/dsk/c1t6d0
The path of the physical volume refers to a device that does not exist, or is
not configured into the kernal.
volume group "/dev/vg00" has been successfully changed.
.
.
.
and it goes on. The suggestion is that the correspondence between physical
volumes and volume groups has been lost.

I've been looking into this problem since 11/11, and
around 11/12 we had an answer. The original operating
system was "burned" so that it expected these devices
on these SCSI channels:

internal disks: channel 1
DVD-ROM: channel 2
disk array channels 5 and 6

The system was delivered with the SCSI channels on:

internal disks: channel 3
DVD ROM: channel 4
disk arrays: channels 1 and 2

What's amazing to me, the system is actually booting! But until this problem is
ironed out, I'm not doing anything with this system, especially anything with
disks (I have no clue what kind of damage could happen
if you mirrored a system with mis-mapped physical
volumes - anyone know?).

So we've called HP hardware to fix this (I'm assuming
it's just a cable swap).

David.

[Jason Luginbuhl_1]

David,

The make_recovery portion of the Ignite-UX product was intended for recovery of
vg00 on the same system that it was created for. It is understandable that
customers choose to use this functionality to make ignite images of an existing
"base" system to install new systems with this same "base". However, you need
to very careful when doing so. Since, make_recovery is expecting to do its
restoring on the exact same system, it expects to be dealing with the same
hardware paths and the same hardware addresses (even in networking). For this
reason, it is recommended that using make_recovery tapes on other systems
should be reserved only for those systems of the same (or very similar)
hardware architectures. You also need to make sure that the networking
parameters are not included or else that will result in duplicate MAC Addresses
and/or IP Addresses on your network.

If you are planning to use make_recovery to ignite another system this will
require a lot of planning and foresight. You will also probably need to run
make_recovery with the -p option to allow you to preview and to manually edit
the files /var/opt/ignite/recovery/arch.include and
/var/opt/ignite/recovery/config.recover before resumimg with make_recovery -r
and actually creating the tape. This can be quite involved. You can consult the
man page for make_recovery for more info. If this is not satisfactory then you
may consider assistance from a HP Consultant or attending the HP sponsored
3-day class "Managing Software with Ignite-UX".

[David Myers_3]

Jason,

I thank you for your thoughtful response, but both operating systems (Ignite)
were done by HP, the hardware is essentially out of the box, the HP-PB
addresses are the same, the machines have the same hardware, but the SCSI
channel addresses are different. However, the Ignite was made assuming a
certain match between channels and HP-PB addresses and only one of the machines
follows these addresses. This is the comparison:

Machine 1 Machine 2
internal disks c1t5d0 c3t5d0
c1t6d0 c3t6d0
DVD-ROM c2t2d0 c4t2d0
30/FC array c5t0d0 c1t0d0
c5t0d1 c1t0d1
c5t0d2 c1t0d2
c6t0d0 c2t0d0
c6t0d1 c2t0d1
c6t0d2 c2t0d2

I don't recall all the HP-PB addresses offhand,
but *both* internal disks are addressed as 10/0.5
and 10/0.6 respectively. Examination of /etc/lvmtab
with strings yields the following correspondence:

/dev/vg00
/dev/dsk/c1t6d0

So machine 2 yields a slew of boot errors: (example)
.... (booting)
/sbin/bcheckrc
lvlnboot: Warning: couldn't query physical volume
/dev/dsk/c1t6d0
The path to the physical volume refers to a device
that does not exist, or is not configured into the
kernel.
Volume group "/dev/vg00" has been successfully
changed.
vgdisplay: Warning: couldn't query physical volume
/dev/dsk/c1t6d0. The specified path does not
correspond to physical volume attached to this
volume group.
vgdisplay: Warning: couldn't query all of the
physical volumes.
...(continues boot process and comes up 'fine')

I'm not a hardware jock on HP-UX (though I've worked
with it as a user and an administrator since 1990) and
exactly how this correspondence between HP-PB addresses and SCSI addresses
works, I don't know. If it were in
software or firmware, I'd be happy. But that
essential bit of mapping eludes me at present.

David.