DiskSuite help on new BayLISA webserver machine

Tue Nov 16 17:45:01 PST 2004

Synopsis:

I'm helping BayLISA upgrade the machine that hosts its mailing lists
and web server (and other things).  The last thing to do is mirror
its disks, yet this is proving nigh-impossible, because the machine
always forgets where the metadbs are upon reboot.  Is there an
esteemed BayLISA member who can provide some insight after reading
the details below?  Please?

Details:

The system is a Ultra-2 clone, with two internal disks, running
SunOS newwww 5.9 Generic_117171-07 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2.  When
the disks were 9GB, mirroring worked just fine.  Now they're 73GB,
and it doesn't.  Some salient features of SLVM over DiskSuite is
that /etc/system no longer has the mddb locations (/kernel/drv/md.conf
does), and SLVM can figure out what happened if you move disks
around.  In order to perform this last miracle, SLVM either uses
existing diskids, or invents some unique ID for the disk.  OpenBoot
is 3.25 (latest).  I've tried different slices for the metadb, with
no effect.  We've even set up a couple offsite guinea pig systems
to attempt to diagnose the problem, without success.  The rc*.d/*svm.*
scripts were disabled by JASS yet SLVM worked fine this way with
the 9GB disks.

Help.

-- 
Jeff Woolsey {woolsey,jlw}@{jlw,jxh}.com,first.last at gmail.com
"A toy robot!!!!" -unlucky Japanese scientist
"And Leon's getting laaaarrger!"  -Johnny
"Delete! Delete! OK!" -Dr. Bronner on disk space management
"I didn't get a 'Harrumph!' out of _that_ guy." -Gov Le Petomaine