nickel "hanging"

[arkie]

Hi All,

I am trying to take nickel output for 2 servers - in fact the SAP database and central instance servers, which form a 2-node cluster.

But, the output is hanging there forever. The behaviour is similar for both the servers.
----------------------------------------------
Nickel Revision: A.01.12b15-001

Note, the Temporary Output will go to the following Directory:
/tmp/nickel.r3db

Point your favourite Web browser to that directory and
open the file index.html to see the results.

Final Archived File:
/tmp/nickel/nickel.r3db.tar.gz

Collecting System Information...
----------------------------------------------
We have tried by killing the processes, restarting the diagnostic, and restarting nickel, ...

But, it is the same situation.

Need your advise, as we are planning for some new filesystem creation, patch updation activities, and need to have the nickel output before proceeding ...

Thanks in advance

[Suraj K Sankari]

Hi,
Download a new nicle script and try....
did you check your /tmp, Is there any space issue.

If space issue is not there then download new copy of nicle script and try.

Suraj

[Raj D.]

arkie,

check the pid , while nickel running and see where it is hanging, Nickel executes lot of sub commands to collect system information, so if you know exactly where it is hanging you can fix it.

Also you can open another session and check the nickel folder, (where it is saving the files, before making the tar, so you will have idea after which file it is hanging). Then you can take a look at the script to find the command where it is hanging. May be it is hanging in cstm or so. If it is hanging in cstm, you can run a cstm command manually and can check.

Hth,
Raj.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Nickel is just a script to run a bunch of commands. Most likely, something to do with I/O or diagnostics is hanging, indicating that there is an underlying system failure that must be addressed first. As mentioned, when nickel hangs, find the nickel process tree:

UNIX95=1 ps -ef

This will show the parent and child relationship of all the processes. Find nickel and see what it is running. This process will need to be fixed. For instance, if ioscan is hanging, you very likely have a SAN zoning problem. It could also be an old version of the online diagnostics (which need to be kept up to date, just like patches).

[arkie]

Thanks everyone.

Just like Bill said - it was an old version of the online diagnostics. We just removed the Sup-Tool-Mgr B.11.11.16.09, and nickel went thru. We'll update EMS, STM and OnlineDiag to the latest version