Locating disk drives in a sea of A5200s
I manage about a dozen Sun A5200 storage arrays, and periodically need to replace failed disk drives in these arrays. To ensure that I replace the correct device, I first use the format utility to locate the physical device path to the faulted drive:
$ format
< ..... > 43. c7t22d0/sbus@3,0/SUNW,socal@0,0/sf@0,0/ssd@w22000004cf995f6c,0
Once I know which device to replace, I use the luxadm “remove_device” option to remove the drive for replacement, and then run luxadm with the “led_blink” option to turn an amber LED on and off next to the faulted drive:
$ luxadm led_blink “/devices/sbus@3,0/SUNW,socal@0,0/sf@0,0/ssd@w22000004cf995f6c,0:a,raw”
Once I enable the led_blink option, I wander down to the data center, locate the drive with the blinking light, and swap out the failed disk with a new disk. Even though the A5200 is an extremely old storage array, I still thoroughly enjoy managing them.
dean ross-smith on March 16th, 2007
You’re so right about the 5200′s.
We got to play with a5200′s during cluster training a couple of years ago. That many disks in one array is cool!
Dean