SUMMARY: SCSI target binding with JNI fcaw driver

Hi,

I finally got this sorted out so here, at last, is what I found.


Thanks to everyone for your help, especially:
Martin Sjoelin
Steve Hastings
James Fredrickson
Edward Carr


We managed to borrow a machine to do some testing a few days ago.
Up until then I only had our production backup server to play with which
is the machine I need to get this working on, but scary if I break it
and hard to get downtime on. (And it takes 20 minutes to boot)

This is what I found.

I already had the correct sd.conf and st.conf entries.

It seems that what what I was doing was close EXCEPT that I skipped
target 0.  The driver is not very smart in this respect, for an unbound
target it just allocates the first  device it finds, no matter if that
device is later bound to a different target.  So my solution is to start
at target 0 and leave no gaps or make dummy bindings for the ones we
want to skip (if anyone insists on starting at target 1).  We were
leaving target 0 for EMC disk at some stage.

We seem to be using older drivers than everyone who responded, I'd like
to upgrade but may have trouble convincing the powers that be to do it
unless I can find an actual bug.

Martin Sjoelin suggested that I might not be able to bind the same target
on different HBA's.  The documentation is quite vague about this, but
it seems to be the case.  When I changed the targets for the devices on
the second HBA they bound as requested.

Steve Hastings suggested using port binding instead, I hadn't thought
about that but for tape drives (which tend to break fairly often)
it seems like a good idea.  Anything which makes the on-call persons
life easier is a good thing and avoiding a server reboot at 4am after
replacing a tape drive is GOOD.

Edward Carr suggested using ezfibre.  I had seen this on the JNI website
earlier, unfortunately our driver is too old.

Once again, my thanks for your assistance.

Here's what my binding rules in fcaw.conf look like now:

# Binding rules
# Don't leave any gaps.
#       If you want to bind to target 2, bindings must also exist for targets 0 and 1.
# A target is bound only once no matter how many HBA/buses you have.
#       If you bind target 1 and it's on fcaw0 then nothing on fcaw1 ... can bind to target 1.
# Two or three boots may be necessary for everything to sort itself out.
# We can have more than 16 targets. (must find out exactly how many)
# List them below in target order

# EMC disk
target0_port="011e00";

# Do persistent binding for the SCSI (bridge router)
# and FC-al (Brocade switch) tape drives

# the SCSI (bridge router) tape drives
target1_port="011500";

target2_port="011133";

target3_port="011232";

target4_port="011331";

target5_port="01142e";

target6_port="0214d9";

# Don't use target 7, the adaptor lives here on real SCSI bus
# we don't want to define this target in sd.conf or st.conf
target7_port="999999";

target8_port="0211e0";

target9_port="0212dc";

target10_port="0213da";

target11_port="999999";

# the SCSI (bridge router) tape drives
target12_port="021500";



-- 
Euan Pryde                              E-Mail: citecedp@citec.qld.gov.au
Unix Support Specialist                 Phone : +61 7 322 76789
CITEC                                   Fax   : +61 7 322 22684
Data Storage Management