Manual root disk mirroring on Itanium

[Tim Medford]

For many years I have been manually mirroring an alternate boot/root disk on HPUX 11.11. This is in addition to running mirrorUX. The idea was always to have a rescue disk, safe from bad patch installations or other unforeseen problems. Booted from the alternate rescue disk several times and it has always worked.

We have some new Itanium rx3600 servers on order now. Coming with 11.23 and a p400 smart array controller. I'm just wondering if my old steps for manually creating a boot disk will still work with these servers. Has anyone tried this?

Here is my process, assuming c2t2d0 is an unused disk:

pvcreate -B /dev/rdsk/c2t2d0

mkdir /dev/vgroot

ll /dev/*/group <- find an unused number

mknod /dev/vgroot/group c 64 0x0?0000

vgcreate /dev/vgroot /dev/dsk/c2t2d0

mkboot /dev/rdsk/c2t2d0

mkboot -a "hpux" /dev/rdsk/c2t2d0

mkboot -b /usr/sbin/diag/lif/updatediaglif2 -p ISL -p AUTO -p HPUX -p PAD -p LABEL /dev/rdsk/c2t2d0

lifls -l /dev/dsk/c2t2d0 (Compare to primary boot drive)

lvcreate -L 304 -C y -r n /dev/vgroot <- lvol1 used for /stand

lvcreate -L 2048 -C y -r n /dev/vgroot <- lvol2 used for swap

lvcreate -L 200 -C y -r n /dev/vgroot <- lvol3 used for /

lvcreate -L 200 /dev/vgroot <- lvol4 used for /tmp
lvcreate -L 512 /dev/vgroot <- lvol5 used for /home
lvcreate -L 1024 /dev/vgroot <- lvol6 used for /opt
lvcreate -L 1432 /dev/vgroot <- lvol7 used for /usr
lvcreate -L 1024 /dev/vgroot <- lvol8 used for /var

newfs -F hfs /dev/vgroot/rlvol1 <- /stand filesystem must be HFS
....skip lvol2 since it is swap
newfs -F vxfs /dev/vgroot/rlvol3 thru rlvol8

cd /
mkdir altroot
mount /dev/vgroot/lvol3 /altroot

cd /
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot

mount /dev/vgroot/lvol1 /altroot/stand
mount /dev/vgroot/lvol4 /altroot/tmp
mount /dev/vgroot/lvol5 /altroot/home
mount /dev/vgroot/lvol6 /altroot/opt
mount /dev/vgroot/lvol7 /altroot/usr
mount /dev/vgroot/lvol8 /altroot/var

cd /stand
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot/stand
cd /home
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot/home
cd /opt
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot/opt
# cd /tmp
# find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot/tmp
cd /usr
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot/usr
cd /var
find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pxudm /altroot/var

lvlnboot -b lvol1 /dev/vgroot
lvlnboot -r lvol3 /dev/vgroot
lvlnboot -s lvol2 /dev/vgroot
lvlnboot -d lvol2 /dev/vgroot
lvlnboot -R

lvlnboot -v <- verify boot configuration

Update /altroot/etc/fstab to reflect new root vg
Update /altroot/sbin/ioinitrc to include the following line:
- /sbin/lvlnboot -c /dev/vgroot

setboot -p 0/0/1/1.2.0 -a 0/0/2/0.2.0 <- set primary/alternate boot paths.

Reboot the system (shutdown -ry 0), interrupt the boot process and boot from alternate drive.

[Patrick Wallek]

The above method by itself will not work.

You must remember that the Itanium machines have disk slices on the root disk, so you would also need to get c2t2d0s1, c2t2d0s2 and c2t2d0s3 set up on the disks.

There is information on how to do this in the regular Itanium mirroring instructions.

If you do that, and follow your procedures, then I think you should be OK. You would need to be sure and test it before you need it though.

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Tim,

HP spotted that a lot of people were doing this and have now released a product that will do this for you:

http://docs.hp.com/en/DRD/index.html

The advantage with Dynamic Root Disks is that you can also apply patches to the 3rd copy online and then treboot to it to test.

HTH

Duncan

[Torsten.]

HI,

the LVM mirroring procedure is really different for Integrity servers, see
http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000079976529

Also the P400 controller is able to do a hardware mirroring, the procedure is different again.
For both cases, the DRD solution is a good option.

[Tim Medford]

Thanks everyone.

Wow, that DRD product looks promising, I have not even heard of it. Probably could have saved me a bunch of work over the years.

I was planning to use the Raid controller to run the primary boot as either Raid5 or Raid6, so I would gain the hardware mirroring there. Then have an igniteUX tape as a backup. And finally run DRD to a rescue disk.

If that doesn't cover things, I don't know what will.

[Patrick Wallek]

DRD actually wouldn't have saved you much work over the years. The product was just released within the last month or two. It hasn't been out that long.

[Torsten.]

... and it is not available for 11.00 or 11.11 ...