ioscan hangs

[Troyan Krastev]

Hi,
I have HP-UX 10.20 on HP 9000/898/K370 machine.
When I started "ioscan" it just hungs. When I check with "ps" there ware
more then 10 "ioscan" hang processes!
I tried "insf -e" but it doesn't help.

Any suggestions?
Troy

[Thomas J. Harrold · Accepted solution]

Hi. What is the syntax of the ioscan command that you are running? Try something that doesn't actually query devices, but uses what the kernel "thinks" is there:

ioscan -funC disk (or tape, or lan, etc...)

If that works, then your hang may be caused by a problematic device attached to your system.

Check the output of dmesg to see if you are logging any SCSI LBOLT messages, for example.

-tjh

[paul courry]

Using another tool to check a different way......

Use ODE MAPPER from a fresh RS boot. If it hangs then start checking your terminators, SCSI addresses and drives. Remove one piece of equipment at a time until the problem becomes apparent. Since the systems is not yet booted under ODE you are not going to mess anything up by playing with the hardware like this.

[Murray Jones]

Perhaps try running the ioscan command with the "-k" option if you are concerned about whether it's your ioscan binary or not. This should query the kernel about what it thinks the hardware list is, without doing a full probe along device paths.

Having said that, I would agree with the other comments - it's more likely to be a problem on your scsi chain or something similar - check scsi-id's, cabling etc to make sure all is OK. Perhaps somebody has disturbed something. If you have the opportunity to reboot, try the Mapper option, or even do something really simple like interrupting the boot sequence and doing a search for boot paths - this will do a quick little check along the scsi chains. Watch it go through it's probe and see if it halts during this.

Cheers,

Murray

[Patrick Gorman]

ioscan can hang due to a hardware device not responding.

You may also want to look at your patch revision level (assuming you haven't already).

The response suggesting a reboot and using the offline diagnostic (ODE) is a good idea. You can also try the online diagnostic, however, I believe the online diagnostic makes function calls to the ioscan routine, so it may hang as well. It is not good to kill the diagnostic process if it should hang. I would suggest a reboot at that point. So you are almost better off trying the offline as suggested earlier. The point of using the diagnostics would be to confirm a non responsive piece of hardware.

I agree with the suggestion to look at your dmesg. You may find some help there identifying any SCSI LBOLT errors. Of course, you should also look at syslog too.