SSA Recovery

[szewczykm]

I've recovered an old AIX 4.2 box. I've imported all the VG's on the internal disks.

Now I need to move onto the SSA enclosure.

I'll preface this by saying the root of all my problems over the past few weeks was that my SSA disks went offline. Thinking it wasn't hardware (because how weird for two SSA adapters to both blow at the same time!?) I loaded drivers. The drivers messed up my system.

So, I've rebuilt it, restored what I needed from backup, imported all the internal SCSI VG's.

I'm wondering if there's any special anything I need to take into consideration on the SSA drives?

The SSA Car is working. All the lights are on. I've run cfgmgr and it sees pdisk 0-11. But when I list physical disks on the system (SMIT) all I see are HDISK0 - HDISK3.

I'm a little paranoid. I don't know if the disks on the SSA volume are raided. (I'm guessing they are not). But if they are I don't want to risk breaking anything and losing the data on them.

 

[Chapter11]

lsdev -Cc hdisk

Are any of your hdisks described as an SSA Logical Disk?

 

[szewczykm]

Odd, I get no data when I run that command. I thought I'd at least get the other hdisks...

 

[ProbablyDown]

In SMIT I think you have to go to the ssa menu item to view the disks. By default they will show up as pdisks.

So type:

#smit devices

scroll down to "ssa disks" and hit enter
Select SSA phisical disks and hit enter.

They should show up there...

Sounds like you had a fun ride....good luck!

 

[ProbablyDown]

lsdev -Cc pdisk is what you'd type...

 

[szewczykm]

From earlier question: Output:

pdisk0 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk1 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk2 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk3 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk4 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk5 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk6 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk7 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk8 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk9 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk10 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive
pdisk11 Available 00-05-P 2GB SSA C Physical Disk Drive


From the SMIT suggestion: Here's the problem that got me into trouble in the first place.

No one ever loaded any of the SSA management stuff on this system. There is no entry for SSA anywhere in SMIT. In DAIG either for that matter.

I don't have the driver disk for the SSA card. My whole ride started when I went looking for the drivers and IBM gave me something from 4.2.1.0...

If I could find the SSA disk for 4.2 we'd be in business. But I can't. So I'll probably have to do this manually.

I just gotta get those disks online and I can stamp a giant -DONE- on this!

 

[AIXSPadmin]

This is the output of an lslpp on our TSM node:
$lslpp -L | grep ssa
bos.msg.en_US.diag.rte 4.3.3.0 C Hardware Diagnostics Messages -
4.3.1.0 C Docregister Common Messages -
Messages - U.S. English
4.3.3.0 C TCP/IP Messages - U.S. English
bos.rte.devices_msg 4.3.3.50 C Device Driver Messages
devices.common.IBM.ssa.diag
devices.common.IBM.ssa.rte
4.3.3.0 C Device Diagnostics Messages -
4.3.2.2 C RISC PC Software Messages - U.S.
Messages - U.S. English
devices.ssa.IBM_raid.rte 4.3.3.50 C SSA Raid Manager Software
devices.ssa.disk.rte 4.3.3.50 C SSA DASD Software
devices.ssa.tm.rte 4.3.3.25 C Target Mode SSA Support
ssadiskmcode.DCHC.obj 3.2.0.95 C SSA DCHC Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.DFHC.obj 3.2.0.88 C SSA DFHC Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.DGHC.obj 3.2.0.9910 C SSA DGHC Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.DMVC.obj 3.2.0.59 C SSA DMVC Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.DRHC.obj 3.2.0.11 C SSA DRHC Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.DRVC.obj 3.2.0.22 C SSA DRVC Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.WAAH.obj 3.2.0.9910 C SSA WAAH Disk ROS microcode
ssadiskmcode.coraldld.obj 3.2.0.2 C SSA ENCLOSURE Download Tool
ssadiskmcode.coralmcode.obj
ssamcode.base.obj 3.2.0.32 C SSA Adapter microcode
ssamcode.enh.obj 3.2.0.32 C SSA Enhanced Adapter microcode
ssamcode.networkraid.obj 3.2.0.95 C SSA Enhanced RAID Adapter
ssamcode.pcinetworkraid.obj
ssamcode.pciraid.obj 3.2.0.37 C SSA RAID Adapter (14104500)
ssamcode.raid.obj 3.2.0.29 C SSA RAID Adapter microcode
Common Messages - US English

You have to have the "devices*" files for sure at the level you are at on AIX and you have to have the correct microcode level too.

 

[szewczykm]

I really don't think I'm missing anything to make these disks work except for the SMIT scripts to make it easier.

The disks are all there, online, available. There's just not mapping between

hdisk4 -> pdisk1

Or whatever it used to be. I'm pretty sure that's it. So what I need is a command reference for mapping one to the other or for recovering the mappings somehow.

 

[AIXSPadmin]

If you don't have SSA in SMIT then you don't have all of SSA support installed, I would guess, and so you won't be able to map the hdisk->phisk relationship.

 

[szewczykm]

OK for the record:

mkdev -l hdisk# -p ssar -c disk -s ssar -t hdisk -w connectionlocation

You can get the connection location by running

lsdev -Ccpdisk -r connwhere

I'm online again. I can mark it done.

Thanks so much for everyone's patience and help.