Hi, thanks for the various people who replied to my mails. Many had warned
the dangers of adding a new disk to a system without first halting it.
But for the more "adventurous", the answer seemed to be /etc/init.d/devlinks.
Thanks for all your responses.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From kwthomas@nsslsun.nssl.uoknor.edu Wed Aug 4 00:43:39 1993
Many people have said that is only necessary to halt the cpu while connecting
new drives.
Formatting is another can of worms. If you are going to actually format a disk
(as opposed to just creating a partition table), you might find out that any
process that tries to access another device on the same controller as your
new disk will hang in the D state until the format completes.
I'd attach your disk to a non-server workstation and format it there.
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>From john@cs.wmich.edu Wed Aug 4 03:53:02 1993
No NO NO NOOOOOO!!!!!! Is is a hardware thing. Plugging and unplugging
devices (SCSI) can cause self destruction. You can get away with it 5 out of
6 times - but then.
You need to go to something like a RAID box with hot swap to be able to
plug an dunplug drives in a running system.
cheers - john
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>From john@cs.wmich.edu Wed Aug 4 03:53:02 1993
Assuming by "hard disk" you mean SCSI disks, you can run the following script
as root:
---------------- cut here -----------------
#!/bin/sh
#
# add-disk
#
# Runs the commands to make Solaris locate a new disk that
# has been plugged in after the system was booted.
#
_DVFS_RECONFIG=YES; export _DVFS_RECONFIG
/etc/init.d/drvconfig
/etc/init.d/devlinks
exit 0
---------------- cut here -----------------
This will only work if you already have at least one SCSI disk loaded in,
because the SCSI parts of the kernel have to be loaded. I use this on a
semi-regular basis, and it's worked for me. If you look at the stuff in
/etc/init.d, that's all the "/reconfigure" does anyway.
--Dave
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>From Glenn.Weinberg@Eng.Sun.COM Thu Aug 5 06:42:05 1993
Regardless of whether or not you can make this work under Solaris, no current
Sun hardware that I'm aware of supports "hot plugging," which is what you are
describing.
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>From cameron@cs.adelaide.edu.au Thu Aug 5 11:38:33 1993
Have a look at the drvconfig program. It allows you to configure new
devices on the fly.
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>From Mike.Sullivan@Eng.Sun.COM Fri Aug 6 08:30:07 1993
/reconfigure isn't really documented (I think), the only documented way
to reconfigure is to use 'boot -r', but otherwise that's right.
>Now I have some servers that shuting down is highly undesirable (ie. live
>24 hours operation), can I install new hard disks and format them without
>rebooting?
Only if you had previously had a disk in the same position. The system only
makes device nodes for devices it sees at a reconfig boot, so if you never
had SCSI target 1 present before, you'll need to do a reconfig boot with it
powered on and attached for the system to see it.
However, if you do a clean shutdown, and attach all your new disks at once,
it shouldn't take that long to boot (hopefully :-). You can then format/newfs
the new disks during normal operation.
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>From Greg.Onufer@Eng.Sun.COM Fri Aug 6 13:08:59 1993
How would you connect the new hard drives? Attaching them
while the power is on is not supported by Sun (as far as I
know).
But everything accomplished by "boot -r" or "touch /reconfigure ; reboot"
is in /etc/init.d/devlinks so look there for clues.
Cheers!greg
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>From xs.com!celeste@stokely.mtview.ca.us Fri Aug 6 21:07:11 1993
Unless you have one of those new "hot swap" disk towers, how do you
plan to add new hard disks while the machine is running? You could
blow out many fuses by adding a hard disk while the power is on.
Not ever a wise move.
--
James Low Teck Koon
Information Technology Institute, National Computer Board, S'pore
Email: jameslow@iti.gov.sg jameslow@itivax.bitnet
Phone: (65) 7720438 Fax: (65) 7795966
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