qla2xxx dirver problem

[Mark McDonald_2]

Hi all

We have 2 identical servers (DL380 G5) connected to a raid via fibre cards. RHEL 5.0.

These boxes were running fine untill we lost power to the server room last week. 1 server has come back up fine, but the other has failed ot load the qla2xxx driver.

dmesg on the failed server:
qla2xxx: Unknown parameter `ql2xfailover'

There is no options line in modprobe.conf on either server.

The last line of lsmod on the failed server shows qla2xxx is missing:
scsi_mod 130637 4 sg,cciss,scsi_transport_fc,sd_mod

qla2xxx is there on the other machine.

I am unable to add the driver using modprobe:
> modprobe qla2xxx
FATAL: Module qla2xxx not found.

I'm not sure where to look next.

Thanks in advance Mark.

[Mark McDonald_2]

I've just checked another environment with the same hardware and OS.

That also seems to have the same problem.

The machine that had the disks mounted prior to the power loss has failed to load the qla2xxx driver. Some sort of corruption?

[Mark McDonald_2]

Just tried rebuilding the initrd, but that omitted the qla2xxx driver completely.

This directory is empty: /lib/modules/2.6.18-8.1.6.el5/kernel/drivers/scsi/qla2xxx

Should that contain the module?

[Mark McDonald_2]

ok, copied the initrd across from the working server and we have the qla driver loaded and can see the disks.

Problem now is /dev/vg01 and /dev/vg02 are missing, how can I recreate them?

vgscan can see vg01 and vg02

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

> qla2xxx: Unknown parameter `ql2xfailover'

There are (at least) two different versions of the qla2xxx driver. The RHEL 5 includes a standard version of the driver, which does not have built-in multipath handling. RedHat's recommendation is to use device-mapper multipath instead.

HP offers a version of the qla2xxx driver that includes the built-in multipath feature. The message "unknown parameter 'ql2xfailover'" suggests you used to have the version _with_ the multipath feature.
(The ql2xfailover option is specific to the built-in multipath feature.)

The VGs are probably not activated for some reason. What happens if you try to activate them?

vgchange -a y vg01
vgchange -a y vg02

(In Linux LVM2, the udev subsystem manages the device files for the LVs: it creates the devices when the VG and its LVs are activated, and removes them when they are deactivated. The LV device names are guaranteed to be persistent, but the major/minor device numbers aren't.)

MK

[Mark McDonald_2]

Thanks MK, I had just ran the vgchange command and it worked.

Also thanks for the info regarding the drivers. I was given a very quick handover last year, and one thing that was mentioned was a different driver to allow multipathing.

[Mark McDonald_2]

copying initrd from the other system fixed the driver issue.

vgchange -a y vg01/2 fixed the missing /dev/vg0* issue.

Finally I need to reinstall the driver so that I can recreate initrd from the system its self.