How to force scsi bus PKA to be PKC?

[Clark Powell]

I am creating a scsi cluster with two DEC 3000's. I know this is not supported using single ended, narrow scsi but my question is of a more general nature (and it does work!) One DEC 3000 has three scsi buses and so for some reason the bus at the console prompt listed as PKA becomes PKC while the other system with a single scsi bus begins at the console prompt and ends it's boot as PKA. This creates a huge problem because I am unable to connect two cluster members to buses that they refer to with different names (i.e. PKA and PKC) The only way I can get the cluster to work is to take the two extra scsi buses out of the one Dec 3000 and then they both start out as PKA and boot as PKA. I loose two scsi buses this way; not a good deal for me.

My question is, is there a way for me to force the DEC 3000 with one scsi bus to refer to it's bus (after booting) as PKC instead of PKA?

THANKS

[Uwe Zessin]

I suggest that you don't try to shuffle adapters or put in dummy adapters - use port allocation classes instead! In that case, the controller letter for disks and tapes is always "A".

So you can set NODEA$PKA = $1$DKA0: and NODEB$PKC = $1$DKA0:, too.

[Uwe Zessin]

Found some illustrations:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/6318/6318pro_006.html#index_x_307

The great thing with port allocations is also that you can use different classes for local busses and even different host allocation classes for, e.g. IDE CD-ROMs.

[Clark Powell]

Although I only awarded 3 points to your answer (should have been 9 or 10) it turned out to be the correct one that solved the problem. Setting ALLOCATION CLASS was the way to make all the buses DKA. All I had to do was make sure that the bus with the system disk was the same allocation class as the system disk bus on the other system.

Besides editing the SYS$SYSTEM:SYS$DEVICES.DAT file to achieve this objective there are two other ways to make the file conform. One is to use cluster config.com but the one I decided to use is a conversational boot followed by enter these commands:
SYSBOOT> SET/CLASS PKA 2
SYSBOOT> SET/CLASS PKB 3
SYSBOOT> SET/CLASS PKC 1
This forced the "C" bus back to being the "A" bus with allocation class of 1. It also wrote the SYS$SYSTEM:SYS$DEVICES.DAT as
shown
[Port ALPHAR$PKA]
Allocation Class = 2

[Port ALPHAR$PKB]
Allocation Class = 3

[Port ALPHAR$PKC]
Allocation Class = 1


thanks
Clark Powell

[Uwe Zessin]

Yes, the problem of different device names between the SRM console and OpenVMS is using different algorithms on some systems.

You did not tell what version of OpenVMS you are using, but I see that you already have put port allocation classes on all adapters anyway. At least on some old versions of OpenVMS there was a problem when the real PKA adapter did not have an allocation class.

[Heuser-Hofmann]

If you set the sysgen param DEVICE_NAMING to -1
there is no change of the names that you see before boot.

eberhard