SUMMARY: DiskSuite Mirror Failure Testing

Thanks to the following people:

Darren Moulding
Dave, bela@nivek.org
Tom Payerle
Pierre Zimmermann

The following suggestions were offered:

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The metaoffline command effectively fails the disk slice in question.  I am
not sure how convincing a test that is, of course.

Removing even hot swappable disks from a system before the system denotes
the
drives as "failed" can cause hardware damage, or so I have been told.
Having
done it a few times before learning of this, I believe it is one of those
one
time in a hundred or more type things, but worth bearing in mind.

When I wished to test my disksuite mirroring, I offlined all partitions then
pulled the disk, which was a reasonably good test in my opinion.  Not
offlining
the disks would be even better, but chances are the OS could tell a disk
failed
(and presumably would automatically offline it), and the (albeit small) risk
of HW damage was enough to drop that idea.

As for SNMP traps, I believe this is done in conjuntion with another
package.
I just use a cron job running metastat and looking for any suboptimal
metadevs.

Tom Payerle

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Hi Todd,
try cfgadm_scsi or cfgadm_pci to remove a disk from your system (see man
pages of cfgadm)
e.g.: cfgadm -x replace_drive c0::dsk/c0t0d0
or cfgadm -cf disconnect c0::dsk/c0t0d0

be sure that you have also created a boot record on the second disk, if the
first one is your boot disk!
e.g.:  installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk
/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0
and enter this as an alternative boot disk (second boot device) in the boot
PROM)

for logging we use syslog, disksuite writes its messages to syslog.

cu
Pierre

PS: there are already some usefull scripts: 
http://pixie.madstop.com/jumpstart/scripts/install-disksuite.fin

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> When I have two disks mirrored, is there anyway that I can simulate a
> failure of one of them, short of just pulling the cable on one of the
disks?

Nuke the VTOC on the mirrored disk ;) 

> Also, I thought that I read somewhere that DiskSuite will send SNMP traps
on
> failure, however, I can't seem to find where I read that.  Is this true?
If
> so, can someone point me to the docs?

yep. Disksuite can send snmp traps when shit happens. The mib is kinda 
limited in scope but it'll do the job.

http://docs.sun.com:80/ab2/coll.260.2/DISKSUITEUG/@Ab2PageView/idmatch(SERVI
CETASKS-30812)?DwebQuery=disksuite+OR+snmp&oqt=disksuite+snmp&Ab2Lang=C&Ab2E
nc=iso-8859-1#SERVICETASKS-30812

WOOO! UGLY URL! 


--

Dave.

bela@nivek.org

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Todd,

A little slow with this reply, but you never know you may not have got this
solution yet.

You could
fmthard -s /dev/null /dev/rdsk/cxtxdxs2

(this should blat the contents of the disk in question, failing the mirror)

Then use
metareplace -e dxx /dev/rdsk/cxtxdxs2 (your original mirror and disk)

Regards
Darren Moulding

PS I recommend you test on non live data 1st

Todd Urie
Unix Support Specialist
610-680-2231 Direct
turie@trueposition.com
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