SUMMARY: SCSI transport failed

From: Greg Weingart (gwein@ramtron.com)
Date: Thu Nov 06 1997 - 11:39:50 CST


Hello Sun Managers,

Here is my original post:
> I have a Sparc 1 4/60 running SunOS 4.1.4 that has taken a severe
> performance hit,
> by this I mean everything is slow- disk I/O, network response time, a
> simple df takes
> 9 seconds as opposed to 2 seconds on a similar machine. We have not
> made any
> recent hardware or software changes, additions,... and it had been
> stable for
> several months prior to this incident.
>
> I have used standard utils to try to identify the cause ( e.g. top,
> iostat, vmstat,...)
> but with no luck.
>
> I did find the following errors in /var/adm/messages:
>
> Nov 3 02:34:49 zeus vmunix: esp0: Unrecoverable DMA error on dma
> Nov 3 02:34:49 zeus vmunix: sd3: SCSI transport failed: reason
> 'tran_err': retrying command
> Nov 3 03:08:48 zeus vmunix: esp0: Unrecoverable DMA error on dma
> Nov 3 03:08:48 zeus vmunix: sd0: SCSI transport failed: reason
> 'tran_err': retrying command
>
> This machine has 1 SCSI processor (esp0) and 3 external SCSI hard
> disks on 1 chain, which
> by the way is less than 1 meter and is using active termination.
> I have tried to replace cables, terminator, boot using only sd0 and
> remove the other 2 drives,
> all with no effect.
>
> /dev/sd0, external
> Seagate Hawk (ST32155N) 2.1 Gigabytes
>
> /dev/sd1, external
> Seagate 32430N. Megabytes
>
> /dev/sd3, external
> Seagate Barracuda (ST32171N) 2.1 Gigabytes
>
> My questions are:
>
> 1. What do the messages from the log mean?
> 2. Are ( or could ) the error messages be related to the performance
> hit?
>
> The machine is on hardware maintenance, but our vendor thinks this is
> not a hardware issue???



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