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Posts in Storage
Changing the IP address on a Brocade 3200
I purchased a used Brocade 3200 for my home lab, and needed to update the network information to allow myself to login remotely. To view the existing network configuration, I serial consoled in and ran the ipAddrShow command: Once I checked the existing settings, I ran the ipAddrSet command to update the network settings: I really dig Brocade, and their command set is simple and easy to use.
$ read more →Ensuring dm-multipath devices are named consistently across cluster nodes
If you are using the Linux dm-multipath package to provide mulit-pathing in clustered environments, it is super important that the dev-mapper devices show up with the same name on each node. One way to achieve this is through multipath.conf aliases, which allow you to assign a name to a mapper device based on it's WWID: If you want to stick with mpath[0-9]+ names, you can propagate the /var/lib/multipath/bindings file to each node in the cluster. This file contains the name of each mpath device, along with the WWID that is assigned to it: The device-mapper is pretty sweet, and the price tag (free) is even better!
$ read more →Compiling mpt-status on CentOS Linux hosts
I use mpt-status to monitor LSI Logic RAID controllers in my Linux hosts. While attempting to build a package for CentOS 5.3, I ran into the following error: It appears that the compiler.h header doesn't come with the CentOS kernel-headers package (and according to a couple of posts I read, it is no longer a publicly consumable header file), so I removed it from mpt-status.c. This allowed mpt-status.c to build and install correctly: If you are attempting to build mpt-status.c for the first time, make sure you properly install the CentOS Linux kernel source. I received a couple of e-mails from individuals who were trying to get mpt-status working, and in each case the Linux kernel source was not installed properly.
$ read more →Speeding up md device rebuilds
I manage a large RAID5 array at home, and had one of my disks crap out over the weekend. Once I physically replaced the drive and told mdadm to reconstruct the array, I noticed that the rebuild was going to take days to complete. After a bit of digging, it appears that the mdrecovery process throttles itself to prevent the recovery process from consuming all I/O. I was most concerned about getting the RAID array back into a consistent state, so I decided to play around with the speed_limit_max setting to speed up the recovery…
$ read more →ZFS in the trenches
Ben Rockwood is awesome. If you haven't had a chance to check out his blog, its a must read for any Solaris Admin. He gave a presentation at the Open Storage Summit about ZFS. (Video Here) Its worth the read / view for some indepth ZFS concepts…
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