VAX 4000-200 boot fail

[GuyB_1]

I have just inherited a rather old 17 node VAX cluster.

It has been brought to my attention that one of the 3 boot nodes is down and has been since dec-06.

Gets as far as follows.

%CNXMAN established connection to quorum disk
%CNXMAN have "connection" to quorum disk
%CNXMAN have connection to system VAX1
%CNXMAN have connection to system VAX2

and that is it, it just stops there. The node is running VMS 6.2-1H3,

There are no SYSTARTUP_VMS.LOG files being created since dec-06

I have been into SYSBOOT and tried USE DEFAULT, USE CURRENT and USE AUTOGEN.PAR

Nothing seems to be making this machine work?

[Volker Halle · Accepted solution]

Guy,

please be REAL CAREFUL here ! If that node has physical access to shared disks (DSSI ?)and you boot it with the wrong parameters and let it mount any shared disks, you can easily corrupt your shared disks in the rest of the cluster !

The messages you've seen when trying to boot that node, indicate that the node does 'see' nodes VAX1 and VAX2, but nothing else in the cluster, especially NOT the other 14 nodes - assuming they are currently up !

Assuming that the other 14 nodes are satellites and VAX1 and VAX2 are DSSI nodes, this would just indicate, that the bad node cannot talk to the other nodes via the LAN. A node can only join an existing cluster, if it can directly communicate with EVERY member in the cluster.

Check the network connection of the bad node. Try to boot it conversational first, setting STARTUP_P1 "MIN" to prevent it from executing SYSTARTUP_VMS before you have the cluster running correctly...

Volker.

[Volker Halle]

Guy,

and welcome to the OpenVMS ITRC forum ;-)

Volker.